Beat of a Different Drum
by CapturedTsunami
Summary: Redemption comes for all men, even for the Master. Not that he really believes that and even if he did redemption certainly doesn't come with ginger hair, peppermint hot chocolate, fuzzy rainbow striped toe socks, and a cat named Spartacus… does it? More or less T with occasional M moments.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: This story takes place after the ending of "The End of Time Part II".**

* * *

What do you do the moment you realize your entire life has been a lie?

What do you do in that instant when it comes to light that your entire existence meant nothing? That you were never more than a billboard meant to light up the night sky with flashing neon lights? A gigantic "X" to mark the spot in all of time and space so that a bunch of stuffed up, power hungry, war twisted bureaucrats could escape the hell they had dug for themselves?

What do you do with the knowledge that your life, your future, your very _sanity_ has been used up and burnt out, leaving you an empty husk meant to be abandoned at the earliest convenience?

What do you do when you realize that you are nothing but a pawn? Nothing but a host for a parasitic presence?

You give the universe the finger and tell it to fuck off.

"Get out of the way," he speaks before he realizes, the pieces of madness falling into place around the incessant beating in his head. At any other time he would relish the look the Doctor gave him as he moved his figure – with that impossible hair – out from between him and the incoming hordes of Gallifrey. Any other time, but not today. He didn't have the time. None of them did.

_I don't know what I'd be without that noise._

"You did this to me! All of my life! You made me!" he screams, his throat going raw at the sudden, consuming anger bubbling out of his chest and forcing its way up his throat. "One! Two! Three! Four!" he counts off mockingly as he fires off bolts of the energy that has been leaking out of him since his mildly botched resurrection. Burning up his life force, drawing upon the energy of his combined existence, pulling it all down to this moment – if he were expecting to continue on from this well, such actions would be foolhardy. But that was the kicker, wasn't it? He didn't intend to move on from here.

The last blast of energy takes Rassilon to his knees and he cannot help but smile as he stands next to this mighty force, the Lord President himself, and stares down at him. "You have doomed us all," Rassilon whispers, his words all but lost to the roar of the link crashing in around them, the movement of his lips all but lost in the growing brilliance of light. The fallen Time Lord grasps the leg of his pants with a shaking hand, trying to steady himself. He shakes him off disdainfully, a terrible, bitter smile twisting at his lips.

"I know."

What do you do when practically everyone you have ever known makes your life meaningless? You make it meaningless for them too.

* * *

Burning. Fire and ice burning; burning in his veins. Every little piece of him is on fire, melting and disintegrating beneath the rush of flames. A thousand stars have burst into fiery existence beneath the pale expanse of his skin. Burning, ever burning. Burning until he is nothing but light, burning too hot to turn his physical form to ash.

Falling. Endless falling. End over end over end, down into the nothingness. Every little piece of him torn and scattered across the whole of space and time. Absolute desolation.

Fire and ice and nothing.

_I don't know what I'd be without that noise._

Now he knew. He was nothing.

* * *

Cold. That is the first thing he feels: cold. It should be a welcome relief from the fire that raged in his bones and blood but it's not. It's just cold. It seeps into him, forcing itself through his skin, working its way through muscle and sinew to settle resolutely into his very bones. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. He can't think of anything else. Just cold. The ground beneath his cheek is cold. The rock digging into his hip is cold. The wind whistling over his head is cold. It's all cold.

His fingers twitch, digging into the earth beneath them. Dirt, cold and wet, forces itself up under his nails until all of his fingers feel like they're on fire again. But not even the fire is warm. He lets his fingers still and instead forces his eyes to open.

Instantly, he shuts them again. That can't be right, he whispers to himself, that can't be right. He opens his eyes again and stares. He is lying in the dirt, in a half-dried puddle – the small body of water ringed with ice. In front of his gaze is a tumble of debris: boulder sized shards of concrete, a rusted over car engine, an impressive – if haphazard – stack of tires, and assorted twists and coils of fencing and wires. Most of the ground is covered with snow – dirty, old snow that is world weary and well worn by the world. Snow that has long since lost its beauty and is now an off-grey burden that forces the golden strands of dead grass to bend to the earth beneath its weight.

But it is that, there, nestled beneath the arch of the red-orange engine and the curve of the taller stack of tires that catches his attention. Slowly, painfully, he wills himself to his feet lurching and staggering like a newborn deer, he makes his way over to it. Rassilon, everything hurts. Everything is cold and everything hurts. Every single bit of him feels like he's been worked over by a metal bat. Repeatedly. For all eternity.

His toe catches on a half buried pile of steel poles and down he goes, knocking his face against the side of the engine on his way to the ground. It is probably a bad sign that he can't feel what it has done to him. It is very, very bad that all he can feel is cold – not a biting, sharp cold but a deep numbing cold – the type of cold that erases all feeling until there is absolutely nothing less. At least, he thinks that it is bad. He isn't quite sure. This sort of thing was never his forte.

Cold. He's cold. His eyes flutter open and he stares. What is that he's looking at? Tires? Where the hell is he? Why is he looking at tires?

Oh.

There's that.

It takes him six tries to pick it up. Six tries that he remembers anyway. On that final try he manages to make his fingers grasp it hard enough to pull it from the frozen earth. He brings it, with shaking hands, to hover before his blurry gaze and stares at it unthinking, unfeeling.

It was important that he get to this. It was important that he pick it up. Why? Why was it important?

He stares at the bit of plant life sprawled across his palm. It is thin and scrawny, weak from lack of sunlight and warmth, its barely green leaves tinted black with frostbite. It left its birth too late. It sprouted months out of cycle, bursting from the earth as the snows began to fall instead of springing free from its seed into the warmth of a spring or summer sun. It was doomed from the beginning, from the very moment it had cracked from the earth but that didn't prevent it from trying. It had grown, reaching high in an effort to find sunlight, stifled by that which towered around it. It had twisted and turned, desperately seeking a way of survival until it was nothing but a twist and tangle of thin stalk and tender leaves – all rendered mostly yellow, with just the faintest blush of green, by its lack of sun exposure.

Green.

That was it, he thinks dully. That was the important thing.

Plants aren't green on Gallifrey.

He closes his fingers around the bit of green, clutching it between his frozen strips of flesh, and closes his eyes as well.

* * *

Snowing. It's snowing. He doesn't know when it started or how long it has been going on. Not long, he guesses, by the fact that he can still walk without great difficulty – at least not difficulty caused by the excess of frozen moisture. Of course someone could have just cleared the snow from this pathway. That was a common practice, wasn't it? Clearing snow. He thinks it is – not sure though. He's not sure of anything.

It's hard to walk. So hard. His knees aren't working. He can't feel his legs. Every few steps he goes down. Sometimes he catches himself on the rough surface of the brick buildings. Mostly he just falls, his joints cracking as they hit the hard ground beneath him. He can't feel his feet. His shoes are crusted over with packed bits of snow and coated in ice. His thin sweatshirt is damp, crackling with ice in some places as it twists around his body. Wearily he spreads numb fingers in the snow and pushes himself upwards. Eventually he'll just stop, it's only a matter of time. It's snowing and he's cold – frozen more like – and no matter what else he is having trouble remembering he knows that he's not a fool. Eventually he'll just give up and surrender to the fate awaiting him.

He's never been big on futile efforts. Always seemed like a silly, senseless, desperate act of lesser beings who couldn't accept their destiny.

He staggers and catches himself this time, feeling the rough bricks tear at his skin. At least, he thinks that is what that sensation is. He's not sure. He should check.

He takes another step forward instead and tilts his head into the rising wind.

* * *

Night. At least he thinks it is night. It is dark out or mostly so. There are certainly worlds out there where this would be considered daylight but he's pretty sure this world isn't one of them. Why does he think that? Oh, right. That. His fingers tighten around the limp bit of greenery. So, nighttime then. He's mostly sure of that. It's not completely dark. Not like…whatever that place was called. The place with the gates and the wire and the ships and the degenerate forms of human life and…

Oh, never mind.

Snowing. It's still snowing. Why is it still snowing? Hasn't it been snowing enough already? At least he's getting warm now. At least, he thinks he is getting warm. It doesn't hurt anymore. That's a good sign, right? Except for maybe it isn't. Survival skills have never been his strong point – at least not these types of survival skills. Oh he could talk himself out of a room full of the Shadow Proclamation and an entire ship full of the Judoon. He could dance circles of intellect and craftiness all about them. Hell, he'd even charmed himself out of more than one encounter with Daleks for crying out loud. However, these circumstances were…

Wait. Where was he going with this?

Ah, that's right. Snow. It's still snowing.

It's dark and it's snowing. It's cold but at least he's warm. Or maybe he's not. Oh, this is getting confusing. Where _is _he? This isn't Gallifrey. Shouldn't he be on Gallifrey? Trapped with all the other Time Lords? Rotting away inside of a timelock?

Or did he just dream that?

Always possible, he supposes. He's dreamed a lot of things.

Oh look, he is on a hill. At least he thinks he is on a hill. It's the only explanation he can think of for why the ground is sloping downward. He eases himself forward, his knees buckling and bending sporadically. He really wishes they would stop doing that. They're making it very difficult for him to get where he needs to be going.

Wait. Where _is _he going? He pauses in the falling snow and looks around. He is somewhere civilized. He can see the outlines of buildings, blurred though they are by the wind and the snow and despite the fact that it is night there is still light. Not a lot of it but pockets here and there, scattered at seemingly regular intervals. Artificial light. He has to keep moving. He has to…

Where is he going? Where is he?

* * *

He goes down again, clipping his shoulder against something hard. Part of his mind tells him that he should be concerned over the fact that he doesn't feel anything, anything at all but the truth of the matter is acknowledging that he can't feel anything takes too much effort. He's so tired. So very, very tired. Maybe he should stop and take a rest. Here is pretty good, isn't it?

He shuts his eyes and drifts. It is dark here behind his eyelids. Really, truly dark. It's not an empty dark or a sinister dark but instead it is something warm and comforting. Like… well, he's not sure what it is like. He doesn't really have a frame of reference for warm and comforting. Does he? That doesn't seem right. Shouldn't everyone have a memory of warmth and darkness? Doesn't he? If he didn't why would his mind pick those words to describe the sensations going on in the world beyond the frozen flesh that is covering his eyes?

It is so nice here, he thinks to himself. Maybe he has dreamed this up. Maybe it isn't real. Of course it isn't real. He's dead, or as good as. He was consumed by fire, consumed and scattered across the universe. Whatever is left of him is somewhere… somewhere with the Lord President. Somewhere with Rassilon. Being punished, no doubt.

_One. Two. Three. Four._

It's still there, beating slow and faded inside of his skull.

Ah, well. It was too much to hope that he would lose that. Probably his punishment, being forced to exist forever with the constant beating in his head. He'd been cursed by it his whole life. Rassilon probably didn't see any reason to stop it now, not when it gave him such pain.

* * *

Cold. The ground is cold beneath his cheek – cold and hard. It's not the coldness of pure earth or stone. No, this is a cold that can only sink into something manufactured. Manufactured stone of some sort? Why is he lying down? Why can't he feel his legs? Or his arms? Or his face? Does he even have a body anymore?

He forces his eyes open and blinks against the flurry of snowflakes descending into his cracked eyes. Snowing. That's right. It's snowing. Why is he lying on the ground then? You shouldn't lie on the ground in the snow. He never did well with physical survival skills but even he could remember that much. He should get up. He really needs to get up.

Getting up.

Right.

It takes him a while. To be honest, it takes him much longer than he would ever care to admit. Whole galaxies came into existence, lived, and died in the time it took him to stagger to his feet and lurch forward. He goes down again after just two steps. This time he hits his head as well as his shoulder, his entire body toppling into the solid surface – not metal or stone, wood maybe? – and sliding along its length to rest once more on the ground. His fingers trail down after him, fingers scrambling awkwardly and halfheartedly against the smooth wall for purchase to slow his descent. It doesn't work.

He doesn't bother getting up this time. What's the point? He's just going to fall again. And now his head hurts. It's making his eyes heavy. That's probably not good, the little voice inside of his head whispers. Probably not good at all.

_One. Two. Three. Four._ His fingers move softly in time to the beat in his head. Here is as good a place as any to die, he supposes. Wherever _here_ might be.

The smooth surface disappears from beneath his fingers but he thinks nothing of it. His eyes are almost shut after all and the rest of him is almost shut too… drifting, drifting away.

"Hello?"

His eyes try to climb back open at the sudden influx of noise. It's not a bad noise, no not bad. It sounds like a… well, he is not entirely sure what it sounds like, but whatever it sounds like it's nice. Quite nice. It's a very nice change from the repetitive rhythm beating in his ears.

"What the…? Holy shit. No, nothing's wrong. Mary? I'm going to have to call you back. Yeah. I've got to go. Sir? Sir? Can you hear me?"

His eyelids flicker open just enough to wince at the rush of light – golden, not burning white. He can't see anything. Just light. Just light and… what are those? Toes? Are those toes? Toes, he's certain, even though they are covered in fur and rainbow stripes. Not that he's judging, mind you, but he's never heard of a species with rainbow striped toes. The Doctor might know, he muses quietly as he lets his eyes flicker shut again. He's been around the universe a bit more. He _likes_ exploring.

Oh. It's dark again. Dark is good. Dark and quiet and cold. That's all good. Right?


	2. Chapter 2

Samantha Tate – aged twenty-six and gainfully employed in the advertising/public communications department of local publishing house – tossed her phone into the basket sitting on top of the small, painted table sitting next to her door and stared at the unconscious man lying across her welcome rug. She was, to put it simply, completely at a loss at what to do. The logical, reasonable, carry-a-bottle-of-mace-in-your-purse voice that inhabited her head was telling her, in no uncertain terms, to call the police. The logical, reasonable, if slightly nicer more middle-of-the-road voice was suggesting that she call an ambulance. He _had_ hit her door rather hard and God only knows he had probably clipped his head pretty hard against the cold pavement.

Unconscious, he didn't look dangerous. In fact, he looked anything but. Strike that, she thought to herself, he looked positively awful even accounting for the assumption that he was homeless. Given the part of town she lived in and the state of him she felt it was a pretty safe assumption.

"Right. I should just call someone to come get you," she told him, her brows knitting together in thought. God, he really looked awful. Not just the awful of being dirty and blood smeared. No, the type of awful that made her think that he had been wandering around all alone for a very, very long time with no hope or promise of reprieve. God, the color of his skin and the sink of the skin over his cheekbones - it took her breath away.

Around her the wind roared, ripping through the barely covered corridor between apartments and blowing a small cyclone of whirling snow in around her legs. "God help me, I can't leave him out there," she whispered to herself. "I can't." She dropped into a crouch beside him, looking him over carefully. He was bigger than she, taller by several inches but he was also dreadfully thin, his clothes clearly several sizes too big though decently fitted through the shoulders. They were too big now but she doubted that they had started out that way. Thin as he was she should be able to carry, or at least drag, him the few feet into the warmth of her apartment.

Operative word there: should.

Samantha slipped her fingers under the curve of his shoulders and winced at the unmistakable crackle of ice breaking away beneath her fingertips. The zippered hoody, which was likely once soft and marginally warm, was soaked through. "Shit," she swore softly at the squish of icy liquid beneath her hand.

It took some effort but eventually she got him into her living room and shut the door against the brutal onslaught of the wind. "I should call you an ambulance," she told him frankly. "You are frozen, probably concussed…" Her voice trailed off as she stared at him, so motionless and suddenly small seeming as he lay on the stiff commercial carpet that covered her floor. He jerked, a soft whimper tearing itself from his throat as her fingers left him. "What happened to you?" she asked softly, unable to take her eyes from him and unable to make up her mind.

Wet, her brain reminded her. His clothes are soaked and driven full of ice and he had been wandering out in the single digit temperatures for an unknown amount of time. Even if she did call an ambulance between his condition and the state of the roads in this weather there was a chance he suffer brain damage or even die before the paramedics arrived. "Right," she said out loud, going to her computer and rapidly typing a word into the search engine. "We need to get you warm. It's a damn miracle you are still alive and I'm going to try and make sure you stay that way, alright? Please don't turn out to be a serial killer." She glanced at him over her shoulder. "And if you do happen to be a serial killer at least have the decency to wait until I'm asleep and murder me quickly, 'kay?"

She crossed the room to the ancient thermostat mounted on the wall and turned the dial until the small, faded arrow pointed to some random point between seventy-five and eighty. She was tempted to try and turn it higher, if only for an hour so to get that extra rush of heat into the air, but the last time she had tried to turn the thermostat past eighty the whole system had groaned, protested, and given up the ghost. It had been fixed, supposedly, but her faith in her landlord and the handyman he employed was not that great. Her wallet wasn't that deep either, so she left it alone. From the small closet in the hall she removed a couple towels and two lap quilts normally reserved for decorating her couch or keeping her bed extra toasty during the coldest part of the year. After a moment of hesitation she added another blanket, this one fluffy and fleece, to the pile in her arms and carefully carried the tottering stack the few steps back to the living room.

"Right," she announced again after spreading one of the quilts over the couch cushions. "I'm going to undress you." It felt a bit silly to be talking out loud to a man that couldn't hear or respond to her but it would have felt even weirder to simply do things to him without warning. Probably silly sentiment on her part but mama had raised her to be polite, so polite she would try to be.

Because of its bagginess the hoody was fairly easy to remove once she got it going. The thin cotton tee underneath it was just as damp though and because of that it took significantly more effort to maneuver it off of him. "Once again, sorry about this," Samantha apologized as she undid the fly of his pants. "But everything is damp. It has to come off. Figures," she added under her breath. "The first time I have a man in this apartment and he is injured, dirty, and completely unconscious." She tossed the damp black pants onto the nearby linoleum of her kitchen floor, where it landed in a heap next to the rest of his clothes. "And that is a fair indication of how the universe usually treats me," she told him, rocking back on her heels so that she could get a good look at him.

Without his clothes the death-like cast to his skin is all too clear; the ebb and flow of his blood astonishingly visible beneath the translucent stretch of his skin. Gently, and trying vainly to ignore the blush burning in her cheeks, she rubbed him down with the fluffy bath towel she had draped in front of the small space heater while she had undressed him. Beneath her ministrations a bit of color returned to his skin.

Tenderly, mindful of the fact that he likely gave himself a pretty painful whack on the back of the head when he landed on her doorstep, she moved the towel through the unruly mop of white-blonde hair. "At least you're dry now," Samantha told him with a small smile. "That's a good beginning, right?" His chest rose and fell ever so slightly in response to her words and a small sigh of relief slipped from her lips at this tangible proof of life. Carefully, twisting slightly to avoid brushing against a bloodied and bruised hand, she knelt at his side and leaned forward. "I've always been complete shit at finding someone's pulse at their wrist, so I'm just going to listen to your heart," she admitted apologetically. "Not that I know what I'm listening for, but I'm pretty sure I'll realize if it's too slow. Or something like that." She took it as a positive sign from the universe that the idea of her laying her head on his chest didn't cause him to bolt back to consciousness out of sheer terror.

His chest was cold, frigid really, beneath her ear. She nestled it there, just over the left expanse of his chest and held her breath to listen.

_Thum-pit-y-thump. Thumpity-thump. Thumpity-thump._

Samantha sat back on her heels and stared down at the expanse of his chest, the deathly pale skin flecked with small curls of gold so pale it was practically white. "That's…" she began after opening and closing her mouth several times. _It's not like you have to get this right_, she chided herself. _He's not even awake to hear you speak. You're just rambling out loud so you don't feel like a freak_. "Even I know that's a little weird," she confessed. "I don't know what… what if it's serious? I should really just call an ambulance. That would be the best thing. Calling you an ambulance."

Instead, Samantha found herself swearing a little under her breath – despite his diminished muscle mass he's surprisingly heavy – as she hoisted him up onto her couch."A body temperature bath would be the best way to get your temperature up," she lectured softly as she wrapped his bare flesh in the soft warmth of the fleece throw and followed it up with the other quilt. "But there is no way in hell I could manage a bath in your current state without drowning us both, so these blankets will have to do. Hopefully it's enough." She removed the quilt laying across the back of the couch and snapped it open to lay over him. After a moment of thought she shifted the space heater so that it pointed in his direction and drug a chair out of the kitchen so that she could adjust the heat vent in the ceiling so it blew towards him.

"Too much direct heat would be bad; otherwise I would pull out my heat pad. The internet says that it could case cardiac arrest. That definitely qualifies as bad and not something we want to do so hopefully this will work instead. If I can't heat you up directly maybe heating up the air around you will be enough."

Within a few minutes she is rewarded by the faintest of tremors vibrating the layers of blankets as he began to shiver. "Shivering is good," she said after a quick double-check of the Mayo Clinic page addressing the issue of hypothermia. "It means your body temperature has risen enough that you're trying to get warm all on your own now. I don't have a thermometer, so I can't be sure, but if you weren't hypothermic when I pulled you in here then you were at least a bit too close for comfort."

Sitting on the floor she spent the better part of the next hour watching him as the tremors grew in severity. Beyond the shaking of his flesh as his muscles contracted in a frantic attempt to bring up his body temperature he did not move or make a sound. When the worst of the shaking had passed and the muscles in his face had relaxed slightly beneath his skin she got to her feet and went to the kitchen. She cleaned up the floor, wringing out his clothing and tossing it into the clothes hamper in the bathroom while she cursed – once again – her lack of in unit laundry. Then she collected a bowl of warm water, a stack of soft washcloths, and her first aid kit. Sitting on the floor for forty minutes and watching him had given her more than enough time to notice the numerous cuts and abrasions on his face. There was one on his cheek in particular that looked to be quite deep. If nothing else, though, she should check and make sure he didn't need stitches where he had knocked himself on the head.

Humming softly to herself she knelt beside the couch and began to dab gently at his face.

* * *

The insistent, if slightly muffled, ringing of her phone woke her. She had never bothered to turn up the volume after work so it was still a discreet _beep-beep-beep-beep _in the least offensive chiming noise her phone offered. Still, it was an awfully obnoxious and entirely unwelcome sound first thing in the morning.

"Get off," she grunted, pushing at the solid lump of fur that had taken up its customary position on the center of her chest at some point during the night. Inky black fur parted to reveal a single golden orb that regarded her request with about as much attention that it deserved. None. "Get off," she hissed sternly.

"Merowff," he chirped dismissively at her and bared his teeth in a face splitting yawn before he tucking his head down into the curve of blankets covering her chest. His front paws kneading reflexively against her flesh as he made good on his threat to simply go back to sleep and leave her with a fourteen pound purring feline perched on her torso.

"Son of a bitch," Samantha muttered under her breath. "Ask a stupid question…" She grasped Spartacus around the middle and heaved him from her chest. Able to move and breathe once more she plopped the cat into the hollow of warmth her body had created between pillow and blanket before heaving herself to her feet.

By the time she managed to stumble over to the little table sitting next to the front door the phone has stopped ringing. "Of course," she sighed, rubbing at her eyes. The illuminated face of her phone read 8:03 am but it was still dim and cozy inside her living room, darker than it should have been even with the blinds still drawn. "Good thing it's a Saturday," she muttered to herself as she padded over to the window and carefully pulled back the blinds. "Ah," she breathed. _That_ is why it was still dark. Outside a winter storm, of the type she has only seen a few times in the ten years she's lived here, was raging. The entire world was a wash of white: an endless flurry of wind driven snowflakes falling from thick gray clouds that have sunk low enough in the sky to brush against rooftops. Six or seven inches, easily, have fallen since last night in an outburst of weather that showed no signs of stopping.

"Well then," she told herself as she let the blinds fall softly back into place, "good thing I already went shopping this week."

With a small sigh she ran her thumb across the phone's face in answer to another obnoxious beep. _One voice mail,_ she read to herself. _Listen later. One missed call. Mary Simmons. _Right, she was supposed to have called her back last night. Oops. She will have to do that today, sooner rather than later or she'll spend the entire day listening to her phone beep beneath the weight of missed calls and texts.

She nearly set the phone back in the basket but stopped, hand poised to release, as the events of the previous night came crashing back into her head.

Samantha turned, cocking her head and listening intently until she was rewarded with the nearly silent sound of another person breathing. "Still alive then, that's good," she whispered to herself. "Don't want Mary to wake you when she launches her next onslaught," she added, glaring down at her phone. After setting it to vibrate – because she would completely forget about it if she set it to silent – and setting it the padded surface of her purse she moved across the living room, gathering up the pillow and blanket she had brought out from her bed in the very early hours of the morning. After tossing and turning in her bed for over an hour she had just surrendered and admitted being unable to fall asleep without being able to reassure herself that he was, in fact, still breathing. The floor was hard and not terribly comfy but she had definitely slept on worse.

She had sat next to him, carefully cleaning the worst of the dirt and blood from his flesh for a good portion of the night. His hands were bruised and scraped, the pads of his fingertips shredded. There had been a small cut on the back of his head where he had hit it against the concrete that had bled a bit on the quilt, but it was shallow and there hadn't been any swelling that she could see through the dirty strands of his hair. More worrisome had been his face. Something had hit the left side of it with some force at some point, leaving a blossom of bruises and a handful of scrapes and cuts. The flesh around some of the deeper cuts had been red and swollen. From the deepest gash in his cheek she had dug a piece of gravel the size of a pea.

He hadn't woken up, not even when she had dug a pair of tweezers into the flesh of his cheek.

He was still sleeping, thankfully undisturbed by Mary's call. He was still on hi back, pressed into the curve of the couch with his face turned outward so that the battered side of his face didn't press into the surface of the pillow she had slid beneath his head. One of his arms, bare save for the beige spattering of bandages, was flung over his head and the other was folded across his chest, fingers half splayed across the drape of the quilt. Beneath the long gauze wrapped lines of his fingers his chest rose and fell with a comforting regularity.

"Good," she whispered as she straightened the topmost quilt, tucking it in gently around the bare curve of his shoulders. "You're not dead then. Try to stay that way while I go shower."

* * *

Spartacus was asleep on the man's chest when she got out of the shower.

"Damn cat," she muttered as she bent to remove him. "You're not a lightweight you know." Instead, she paused. His hand, the one that had been previously half-splayed across his chest and half clutching the quilt to him as if he were afraid it would vanish the moment he stopped touching, was now tangled in the plush coat of the large black cat – and Spartacus was purring. Not only was he purring, he sounded very much like someone has filled half of a large jar with marbles and was shaking it into a microphone.

In the future, when she looked back on this incident, she would pinpoint that exact moment as the point in time when she stopped considering calling the police, or some other type of official, on him. She would never say so if you asked, primarily because saying it made her sound like a complete crazy person, but that didn't make it any less true. She stopped fighting the little voice whispering out from the far corners of her mind, stopped trying to be sensible about that inescapable, insistent little nudging sensation that pulled uncomfortably at something in her chest all because her cat snuggled up against his skin and purred for all he was worth.

Carefully, so as not to disturb him, she made her way to the kitchen and opened her cupboard doors to stare pensively at the contents. It was Saturday, it was snowing, and she had absolutely no where she needed to be. The options these three facts accorded her were endless and the feeling such possibilities created was rather exhilarating. Today there would be no banana and cold yogurt wolfed down over the kitchen sink, thank God.

She glanced around the curve of the cabinets to the slumbering figure on her couch and pursed her lips. No, today definitely called for something warm and filling – something with lots of calories. A big bowl of oatmeal seemed like the obvious answer but oatmeal was such an easy dish and seemed like a perfectly good waste of the time available to her. Samantha returned her stare to the contents of her kitchen and tapped her fingers against her lips. "Scones, perhaps?" she mused to herself. "With bacon and eggs? I have bacon, right?" She checked her fridge and found an unopened package buried under a head of lettuce and a block of cheese. "That's a go, Houston." Careful to not make too much noise she began pulling ingredients from cupboards and fridge, piling them in some semblance of order on her counter top.

"Hello?" she answered, fighting the urge to whisper. She had dived for her phone the second it had gone off, vibrating in a muffled fashion against the fabric of her purse.

"Sam? Oh good, you're alive. I was beginning to think you'd been murdered in your sleep," a cheerful, if overly dramatic, voice giggled on the other end. Mary, of course it would be Mary. The woman is like the tide: completely unstoppable. "What happened to you last night? I waited and waited… had to endure some sort of macho movie with Andrew. It was boring. They kept blowing things up."

Samantha barely managed to stifle a bark of laughter. "Oh, you know me… I got distracted," she replied quietly, shrugging as she cubed the stick of butter.

"Oh – did that couple next door finally implode? She finally left him, didn't she.? I _told_ you she would!" Mary exclaimed. This time Samantha laughed before she could stop herself, the light peal of laughter ringing through her apartment.

"No, nothing that exciting," she corrected, wincing slightly as she thrust her head out of the kitchen to check on the duo of bodies occupying the couch. Both man and cat were still sleeping undisturbed. "I…" Her gaze lingered on the man, or rather on the line of his nose, the curve of his cheek, and the unruly tuft of blonde hair sticking up over the surface of the pillow. "I heard a cat fight," she told her friend evenly. "Spartacus has been on a '_I'm a big bad wild cat'_ kick lately so I had to make sure he hadn't escaped," she continued as she ducked back into the kitchen. "Can't really afford any vet bills currently and you know Spartacus – all fluff and no fight. He'd get shredded into little black ribbons."

Looking back, that was the very first time she lied for the man that she had pulled out of the cold.

It was a small white lie, all but lost in the grand scheme of the universe's uncountable details. Despite that, though, it was worthy of notice. Unbeknownst to Samantha Tate, that was the very first instance in all of time and space where someone had lied _for_ the man instead of lying _to_ him.

* * *

**A/N: **

**I need another writing project like I need a whole in my head but this one _would. not. leave. me. be_. (The Master is pushy. PUSHY!) As always, comments are appreciated in all forms - the good, the bad, and the ugly.**

**Merry Christmas/ Happy Holidays!**


	3. Chapter 3

Warm. He is warm. Not burning; not eaten up with flames so hot they sear to ice within his veins but _warm_. Not numb; not cold to the point of false heat and unfeeling but honestly, truly warm. How did that happen? Where is he? The last thing he remembered…

_"Get out of the way." _The look on the Doctor's face: surprise, yet sorrow. A terrible understanding of what he was about to do, and then…

"_You did this to me! All of my life! You made me! One! Two! Three! Four!"_

"_You have doomed us all."_

"_I know."_

_I don't know what I'd be without that noise._

Nothing. He was nothing. He _is_ nothing.

Cold. He remembers the cold. Cold and snow and unrelenting pain - like he had been beaten. No, like every part of him had been fractured and broken. It was if he had been unmade and then forced back together beneath fire and ice: hammered together on the surface of a star. He aches. Everything except his face and the back of his head aches - they sting. There had been something else, something important…

Green.

The plant had been green.

He isn't on Gallifrey. Where is he? Why is he here? Is it real? Is it a trap? A prison? A dream?

Soft. He's lying on something soft and he's warm. That can't be right. The last thing he remembered was cold and hard and watching the snow fall down into his eyes. Why is it soft? And warm? Why won't his head stop aching? He can't move. There is something heavy pressing on his chest, just over his hearts. Prison then, this must be some sort of prison.

A dream inside a prison or maybe the dream _is_ the prison. That sounds very Rassilon.

Except the weight is soft and warm and… _alive_. Yes, alive, he decides as he rubs it with his fingers. It shifts beneath his touch and begins to vibrate, the tremors of noise buzzing against his chest. Is that… purring? Is that a _cat_ sitting on him? Where did a bloody cat come from?

He opens his eyes, wincing as the light touches him. It's not bright, not at all, but it still hurts. That probably isn't very good. He is inside some sort of dwelling and lying on some sort of… something. Couch, sofa, chesterfield, settee… or something like that. Why won't his head stop hurting?

And yes. It is a cat sitting on his chest. A big, black, fluffy cat who is lazily kneading away at the blankets heaped over him.

Noise. That noise again. What is that noise? It's nice. Whatever it is, it's nice. Soothing. Soft. A cooling balm spread over the fiery ache that consumes him. Talking, he realizes after a moment. Someone is talking and he doesn't ever want them to stop. He can't even understand what they're saying but that doesn't matter. He just wants to close his eyes and listen to that noise for forever. It's so fluid, like water, trickling in to fill up all the empty spaces. Whispering, touching, bending around everything until it is everywhere. Nothing like the drums. Nothing like that inescapable beat.

_One. Two. Three. Four. _He counts off silently, his fingers flexing against the cat's coat. So quiet. The drums are so quiet. They've never been this quiet before: muffled and… hidden. Like the sound of footsteps covered by the rush of moving water. This is the closest he has come to silence since that ill-fated day when he opened his eyes and stared the whole expanse of the time vortex right in the face.

Please, he begs silently, don't ever let this stop.

So of course, his life being what it is, it does stop. He doesn't imagine that you get any favors in prison. Not the type of prison he must be in, anyway. He flings a forearm over his eyes and groans as the insistent beat swells to fill the emptiness. _One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. _

God _damn_ it.

"Oh, you're awake." The noise touches his ears softly, thrumming through his body like an electric current and producing a reaction not dissimilar to a man that has actually been on the receiving end of a shock. He snaps his arm back and wills his eyes open, twisting his neck painfully far in an effort to see the source of the voice. He tries to sit up but is too weak to budge against the weight of the feline sleeping on his torso. It takes a moment but eventually he finds her around the violent explosions of pain bursting across his eyes like bloody fireworks. Her. That's what the noise is – a voice, a female voice. "How are you feeling? Do you need anything?"

_I need you to keep talking_, he whispers inside his head. _Make the drums go away. Make them fade for me. Don't stop talking. _"Where…?" he manages to force out between parched lips. Important things first. Where is he? What has Rassilon done to him? Because this can't be real. Can it?

"Safe and sound," she replies, crouching down beside him.

So not real then. Of course. Glad they got that cleared up.

"You were a mess last night but thankfully you wound up here. I got you in and warmed up before the worst of the storm struck. You look a little less like death now. Let me get you a drink of water, I bet you're parched." She stands and moves away, disappearing from his line of sight.

Unable to stop himself his hand jerks involuntarily after her. _Come back_, he cries inside his head, even though he knows it is just a dream. Just a taunting, impossible dream. _Come back and talk to me!_

"Here. Let's move Spartacus. He can't be making it easy to sit up," she came back as quickly as she had left, kneeling back down beside the couch and setting a glass of water carefully on the floor. "I would have moved him earlier," she explains as she lifts the feline off him and sets it on the floor. "But you seemed to like that he was there. He certainly thought you made a wonderful bed," she adds as the displaced feline huffs in disgust and promptly hops right back up on to the couch and settles in down by his feet. The female swears. Impressively. "Sorry," she adds, apologizing instinctively with a quick glance at his face.

He can feel… what is that? Is he smiling? He is. Rassilon, he is trying to smile. "It's fine," he croaks with vague motion of his hand. Fine? _Fine? _Did that word really just come out of his mouth? That's nearly as bad as _please_. Or _thank_ _you_. Oh, by all that is holy, he better not be saying _thank you._ What is happening to him? Where the holy fuck is he?

He tries to sit up and nearly topples off of the couch. The female catches him, steadying him with hands around his shoulders. Just like that the rising hysteria that he can feel bubbling up his throat stills and begins to retreat as his attention refocuses itself to her proximity. Her smooth, pale flesh is pleasantly heated against his and her touch causes him to shiver just a little. So, warm blooded species. With the heat of the room he hadn't been entirely sure. It would help immensely if he could actually see her but whatever is going on has robbed him of most of his sight. He can see her but he can't _see _her. She's naught but blurry outlines and blips of color moving in front of his face.

Why is he trying to figure her out? She can't be real. She isn't real. Is she?

"Careful," she murmurs as she helps him find a position from which he won't immediately fall and crash into an embarrassing and painful heap on the floor. "You were just about frozen to death when you landed on my doorstep," she adds as she tugs a blanket out from underneath the cat and twists it around his shoulders and under his arms. It's soft, so very soft. And warm. And it smells…

It smells like her, he realizes after a moment of confused thought. It smells like flowers and iron and sunshine and… cinnamon? Yes. Cinnamon.

He holds still and lets her wrap him up and adjust the heavier covering of multiple blankets across his lap. "Here, drink," she instructs gently, pressing something smooth against his lips. A glass, he realizes after a moment. He opens his mouth and lets the water slip inside, swallowing reflexively. It's not cold, not really, but it makes him shiver anyway. "I'll get you something warm. I don't have coffee – can't stand the stuff personally – but I've got peppermint hot chocolate. Oh, and I think I've got some tea stashed in the back of the cupboard from the last time I was sick. Chamomile, I think."

He blinks, several times, and waits for her words to filter through the fog that is blanketing his brain. "Hot chocolate," he whispers. The last time he had tea he had been the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The last time he'd bothered to have a cuppa he had almost destroyed the world. Had almost cut a rift in time itself with his damn drive to save his people. To rebuild. Had Rassilon implanted that in him too? Along with the drums? Or was that peculiarity his alone?

Probably Rassilon. He, as far as personalities and lives went, didn't actually exist. He is nothing. Whatever he might have been, whatever potential he might have once held – he is nothing now. Absolutely nothing.

He tips his head against the high back of the sofa and shuts his eyes.

* * *

The hot chocolate is minty and rich. He can even smell the damned cream swirling its surface. She places it in his shaking hands and presses her own over top of them to steady his grip and helps him raise it to his lips. He's weak. So bloody weak. But he lets her help him, whatever she is, because the hot chocolate is both hot and good and he can feel the heat from it radiating out of his stomach and up from his fingers. Mostly, though, he lets her because the longer he works to take sips from the mug held in their hands the longer she will talk on aimlessly, giving him words of encouragement and a scattered, if thorough rundown of his current physical condition. He drinks slowly. He doesn't care that his stomach is roaring at him, starving for food. He doesn't care that his head is pounding so hard that there is a very distinct possibility that he'll end up being sick all over the blankets, the female, and the couch. He doesn't even really care if this all happens to be a dream.

As long as she keeps talking, the rise and fall of her voice smothering the unrelenting beat in his head, he doesn't really give a fuck about anything else.

* * *

"You're human." Of course she is human. Warm blooded and smells a bit of iron and salt? Definitely human. Stupid, stupid – it should have been easy to figure out.

He peers at the female over the white rim of the cup still clasped between their hands. He can see her now, mostly. He can't quite tell her size or shape, given that she is still kneeling in front of him, but she is… pretty, for an ape. Pale skin, pale to the point of almost looking blue and saved from that fate only by a faint blush of rose visible where multiple veins gather. In stark contrast to the pale expanse of her flesh her hair is fiery. No, that's not quite right. Fiery implies too much light. This is blood beneath the last rays of sunset. It is autumn leaves, not freshly fallen, but drenched in rain and time until the brightness of the crimson hue has faded but the color intensity has not. And her eyes… gray. Not the dark gray of rising storm, or even the soft blue-gray so often seen peering out of the apes' faces but a clear, light crystalline gray. It is the gray of old sea ice and banks of fog at sunrise. It is the gray of moonlight and the blush where the fading light of stars begins to surrender to the sheer blackness of space. They stare unblinking out of a delicate, fine boned face completely unfazed by the comment that has just fallen unchecked out of his mouth.

Of course, he adds silently, why should he care what she thinks of him? She's just a stupid ape. A stupid ape who apparently makes him wax poetic.

"And by both the question and tone of your voice I'm guessing that you are not," she responds, taking the empty mug from him and setting it on the floor. "Whatever you are, you clearly consider yourself some type of higher life form." She shrugs, an elegant tilt of one shoulder. "Not surprising. Given the limited interaction Earth has had with aliens I can imagine that we all seem quite backward to you. Probably even more so here. We haven't gotten as much action as England – all of our alien encounters are hushed up and buried in Area 51. Still, it was our President that got assassinated. And I do watch the news occasionally."

He winces and rubs at his face, feeling the prickle of stubble beneath his bandaged fingers. "Earth, then?" he asks, hoping that she didn't notice his reaction. Her eyes, still watching him, narrow slightly but she nods anyway.

"Yes," she affirms. "Earth. The United States of America. Utah. Salt Lake City."

He closes his eyes. Why would Rassilon make him dream about Earth? Rassilon knew nothing about Earth. Nothing. "What year? What's the date?"

He can't see the surprised look on her face, but he doesn't need to look. He can hear it in her voice as she responds, "December 17, 2011."

Ah. So after his time. Good and bad. Good because he won't have to deal with the possibility of running in to himself. Bad because… well… why doesn't she recognize him? He shot her president. Live. Broadcasted for all to see. Even the loss of the paradox machine hadn't been unable to do that. No, he'd managed to complete _that_ particular bit of artistry before the orbs came crashing through.

So why hadn't she called the police? Or the government? Or…? Bloody hell, the whole damn planet probably has the Doctor on speed dial. When is he going to show up? When is _he_ going to come waltzing in with his bloody Tardis and his damn companion and offer to "fix" him? Like he's a broken toy. Like he's a puzzle. Like he… like he always has. Fix. Fix. Fixing. Even when they were young.

Of course this is a dream, a prison, or both so it really doesn't matter. Does it?

Unless this is real.

Why would this be real? How could this be real?

"Hey? Are you okay?" She is touching him again, the fingers of one hand wrapping around the wrist still in his lap while she gently brushes his face with the other. "Where'd you go?"

"Far away," he whispers before he can stop himself. Sweet Gallifery, why is he still talking? She's an ape. She couldn't understand. She won't understand. Wait, won't? Won't implies that he'll be talking with her more. No. He has to leave. He must… he must what?

Earth. 2011. _Why is he here_? Better yet, is this even real?

"Anything I can do for you?" she asks, letting her hand fall from his face. Good. Bad. No, definitely good. He doesn't need her touching him. He just needs her to talk. No. No he doesn't. He just needs her to go. No. This is her house. To force her out of it would be bad manners, especially since she seems to have saved him, even if he didn't necessarily want to be saved. Rude, is he rude? Of course he's rude. Or was that just Rassilon leaking through? Because if you look rude up in the dictionary you'll find him, a big ol' fat picture of Rassilon preening in his costume. His head hurts. Why won't his head stop hurting? No. Stop. Focus. Question, there was a question.

"Bathroom?" he asks. Is that his voice? He must be sick. Just his luck. Superior Time Lord physiology and he goes and gets sick. Of course he does. He's defective. He's nothing. He isn't even a real Time Lord. Not anymore. Was he ever?

"Just right there," she motions to somewhere behind him with her head. "Here, let me help you up." Reluctantly – weak, he is so damned weak – he takes her hand and lets her haul him to his feet. He'd like to say that he got up mostly by himself but he'd be lying. Of course that had never stopped him before. He did manage to keep the blanket draped over his shoulders. "Careful," she warns, her voice brushing against the bare expanse of his chest as she tightens her grip. "Don't want you to hit your head again." He grunts, wincing. He hit his head? When did he… oh, right. Then. No wonder his head hurts. "Here you are. Bonus of a small apartment, you don't have to walk a long ways when you feel like shit," she tells him, her lips twisting upwards in a grin as they shuffle the couple of feet down the hallway to a door. "I'll leave you alone. If you need anything, just shout." She gives him a steady look, those crystalline eyes narrowed and the curve of her lips pursed sternly. "I mean it."

He reaches out and grabs the doorframe, pausing for a moment to steady himself as she lets go. Cold. He suddenly feels cold. That's ridiculous. She's not that much warmer than he is. He closes his eyes and forces himself to inhale deeply. He transfers his grip to the cold, smooth surface of the vanity and lets his body shuffle – okay, fall – into the bathroom before shutting the door behind him.

With the bulk of his weight leaning forward against the vanity and sideways against the wall he lets his grip on the vanity's edge relax. Idly his fingers began to tap, ever so gently: _one, two, three, four._ He takes another deep breath and feels the tremors in chest and torso begin to calm, just a little. _One, two, three, four. _He opens his eyes.

No. No. No. No.

No.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. No. He attacked the Lord President. He broke the link between Gallifrey and Earth. He took himself into the timelock. He should be dead. At the very least he should be imprisoned somewhere. He should be punished. He had just killed Gallifrey as surely as the Doctor had so long ago. He was diseased. Worthless. Nothing. Broken. Not… this.

"No," he whispers out loud, his shaking hands rising to trace his features.

The same, but different. His hair is longer and more silver-white, less blonde-and-brown. Same ears. Nose - different. It looks like he's been in one too many brawls. Eyes – same. No. Different. They were brown. Now they're blue. A deep blue: the blue of a midnight sky and the dark of the sea.

Damn it, he's waxing poetic again.

Chin, still pointy-ish. Cheekbones, a little more prominent. Taller. He's taller. At least an inch or two. His shoulders are broader too, not much, but some. Enough to be noticeable.

"No," he whispers again, this time more loudly. "No. No. NO! I'm supposed to be dead! I'm supposed to be… Rassilon, what have you done to me!" he screams, slamming his hands into the vanity top. "One! Two! Three! Four! It's still there! _It's still there_!" he cries, collapsing to the floor.

Bleeding, his hands are bleeding and there is noise at the door.

He doesn't care.

"No, no, no, no," he cries over and over as he slams his aching hands into the tiled floor.

"Stop, stop! You're hurting yourself!" That noise, that noise is back. "It's alright, it's alright," it soothes mindlessly, warmth grasping at his hands. That noise, it…

"One. Two. Three. Four," he counts as the beat calms in his head, half drown by the rush of that noise. "It's still there," his voice breaks and the warmth on his hands eases enough for him to cover his face. "Dead," he sobs into his hands. "I was supposed to be dead. I wanted to die. He wouldn't shoot me. Of course he wouldn't. Not even to save the world. So I…"

Something terrible and desperate and broken claws its way from his throat and he screams into the curl of his fists and the blood dripping across his lips. The warmth is there, hovering over the hands at his face. The warmth is there, trailing through the tangled, knotted strands of his hair and down across his shoulders. It is cold and hard below him; soft and warm all around him.

Cinnamon. He smells cinnamon and flowers and iron and salt.

Dead. He is supposed to be dead. Breaking the link, it should have killed him. Bar that, Rassilon should have seen to it. Eventually.

Not this. _This_ shouldn't be happening. _This_ shouldn't even be possible.

He isn't dead. He isn't imprisoned. He isn't even on Gallifrey.

Earth. He is on Earth.

This is real.

And he has regenerated.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: This chapter contains talk of suicide. If this is a trigger for you please take appropriate measures and/or don't read.  
**

* * *

She wasn't entirely sure what had happened. Samantha had left him, somewhat reluctantly given his unsteady condition, and gone to the kitchen to pull the scones from the oven. "Thank god," she told Spartacus who was sitting in front of the fridge and staring at it intently. "Got them before they burned. I was worried there for a moment." She turned enough to see where the cat's attention was focused. "No," she told him sternly. "I know you know that there is leftover chicken in there. I'm going to use it to make dinner. Not for kitty." Spartacus blinked, long and slow, and flicked his tail expectantly. Samantha sighed. "Why do I even bother?" she muttered as she opened the fridge and dug out a piece of the cold rotisserie chicken. "This is it," she told the cat as she broke it into smaller chunks and set it on the floor. "No more." The contented rumble that vibrated out of his chest was response enough. If he decided that he wanted more, she would give it. End of story. True, too.

It was less than a minute later, as she was washing out the man's mug that the screams began.

"What the hell?" she whispered, unable to quite catch the words that he was yelling but all too aware of the unmistakable crash of flesh against something hard. She pounded on the door. "Are you okay?" she called urgently.

"No, no, no, no," he cried behind the door, and though it was answer enough she didn't think that his words were meant for her. Going by the unending repetition of his words and the rhythmic slap of flesh against something – Counter top? Floor? – that he hadn't even heard her.

"I'm coming in!" she warned, twisting the door handle and pushing inward. The door moved about three inches and then stopped. She sighed. He was on the floor then. Gently, if persistently, she continued to press the door open. She didn't want to hurt him but she needed it open enough for her to actually slip inside and, despite continual New Year's Resolutions to lose that last ten or fifteen pounds, she wasn't _that_ skinny. She sucked in her stomach, vowed to go to the gym more, thought "THIN", and wormed her way into the bathroom.

He was in a heap on the floor behind the door in a position that managed to be both sitting and lying as he smashed his open palms over and over against the tile floor. "No, no, no, no!" His voice was both a sob and a howl, something torn between absolute rage and complete and utter despair. It made every hair on her body stand on end. All she noticed though was the unmistakable smear of blood across the tile.

"Stop, stop! You're hurting yourself!" she dropped to the floor beside him, forcing herself into the narrow space between his torso and vanity. "It's alright, it's alright," she soothed, snatching at his hands and trapping them in her own. "What happened?" she whispered under her breath as she tried to get a good look at his hands. Last night she had bandaged the deeper, larger cuts and left the numerous small scratches free, and now they were the ones that were bleeding the most. The force of his blows had not only split them but made many of them deeper. She wasn't sure she had enough bandages left for what he had done to himself. "What would make you do this?" she breathed, unconsciously stroking her thumbs along the backs of his hands.

"One. Two. Three. Four," he murmured, his voice finally falling into a quiet desperation. He looked at her over their clasped hands. His eyes, so deep a blue they were almost black, looked at her unseeing and yet… They were clear, she realized. For the first time since he had woken up this morning and despite his current situation his eyes showed a level of cognizance that had not been there before. "It's still there," his voice broke on the last word, a look of such wretched despair written on his face that Samantha felt her heart stop inside of her chest. So much sadness, so much anger… the level of self-loathing written on his face stole the breath from her lungs. His hands moved within her grasp, and after realizing that he clearly wasn't going to start hurting himself again, she reluctantly let them go. He immediately covered his face and broke, sobbing into them. "Dead. I was supposed to be dead. I wanted to die," he keened. He curled his fingers downward, folding them over his mouth and looking up into her face. Even half-lying as he was he was barely shorter than she was kneeling. "He wouldn't shoot me," he told her, a bitter laugh bubbling out of his throat. "Of course he wouldn't. Not even to save the world." He gave his head a little shake, as if he was trying to dislodge water from inside his ears. "So I…" He shook his head again and shut his eyes.

The sound that came out of his throat made every square inch of her flesh ripple, pebbling it with goose bumps. It was terrible: high and keening. It was the sound of a man so utterly alone, so utterly broken that there were no words under heaven to encompass the tumult of emotions that consumed him. Even muffled by the hands fisted over his lips it was just loud enough and long enough that it reverberated against the tile and echoed, seemingly endlessly, around the small enclosed room.

If Samantha had thought herself sympathetic before, it was nothing compared to now. That cry, this scene playing out before her of a broken man – alien or no – sobbing into his hands was enough to make even the hardest, most wary of hearts soften. More than that, though, it was his words. They reached right down inside of her and stopped her heart. No, not just stopped it - tore it from her chest and ground it against the cold, hard floor.

Despite the fact that just about every reasonable part of her brain was screaming at her to shut the door and go call the cops - particularly the mace-toting, '_let's go to Krav Maga tonight_' part – she eased into a sitting position beside him. For a moment she considered pulling his hands, still bleeding all over the place, away from his face but in the end left him that small shred of privacy. Naked, alone, and in a stranger's house? The man probably needed all the privacy she could give him. With that in mind she leaned over tugged the fleece blanket out from where it was tangled underneath his legs and pulled it up over his lap.

"It's alright," she repeated, keeping her voice soft and low. "It's alright. You're safe here. It's alright." Hesitantly she reached out and ran her fingers through his hair, down the side of his head, and across the cool skin of his shoulder. "It's alright." She lifted her fingers and ran them through again. "It's alright." And again. A great shuddering breath hitched through him and he leaned into her touch. Bereft of his hands to support him the slight tip in body mass made him collapse against her.

She half caught him with her other hand and eased him down until his head rested in her lap. "Shhhh," she soothed, reaching down to pull the blanket up higher. "It's alright. Get it out. Get it out." Samantha leaned back against the wall and stared up at the mirror. In it she could just barely see the beginning of a reflection. A sad looking woman holding a sadder looking man. "It's alright," she whispered again, giving her reflection a broken little smile.

On the other side of the door Spartacus meowed, demanding more chicken.

* * *

"I had a sister once," she said. Samantha didn't know why she had told him that. She certainly hadn't meant or intended to; it had just slipped out. Maybe she was simply tired of mouthing the same empty platitudes over and over – because she certainly didn't know if it was going to be alright or if he was safe here. She certainly hoped so – in both scenarios – but she couldn't be sure. Maybe she felt… not cruel, but something. Here he was so exposed and vulnerable - open for anyone to see. It felt wrong, in a way, to remain closed. _Privacy_, she mused. Perhaps by exposing herself she was offering him a touch of privacy back. Perhaps that was just silly sentiment, a delusion within her mind. Whatever it was though, it kept her talking. "Older. Just by two years. She was gorgeous and smart and funny. God, I always wanted to be just like her. I wanted her thick dark curls and bright blue eyes. I wanted her brains. She was always getting good grades and winning awards in math and science related things. She was, I suppose, the stereotypical perfect big sister. Except she wasn't. She was herself. Unique. And absolutely wonderful."

She curled her fingers through his hair. It was so soft; like silk and feathers woven together. "She didn't think so though," Samantha added softly, smoothing the spiky tufts of his hair back against his head. "She didn't see, didn't know, how much she had. How many people she had. Came home from school when I was thirteen and found her in the bathtub. She'd slit her wrists with her razor."

Samantha forced herself to swallow past the sudden knot in her throat, forced herself to keep her fingers from clenching in his hair. Instead, she wiped the scattering of tears from her eyes with her free hand, mindful of not smearing her mascara. God knows she didn't need to scare him by turning into a red-eyed raccoon. She inhaled deeply and then exhaled to the count of ten, feeling it shudder through her.

"I don't have that option," his voice was hoarse and bitter, muffled against her leg. At some point he had removed his hands from over his mouth and let them fall. One lay limply on the floor but the other was on her knee, the fingers curled around the curve of her kneecap with a tension that made her think he was fighting the urge to grip her leg with a potentially painful amount of force. She was going to have to change her pants though, there were spots of blood all over them. Probably her shirt too, now that she thought about it. Internally she shrugged. There were plenty of clothes in her closet.

"Slitting your wrists?" she asked, startled into an alarmed and frank response.

"Yes," he replied dully. "Don't stop," he added as her fingers stilled against his skull. His voice was barely a whisper against her thigh and something she doubted he had meant to speak out loud let alone for her to hear. For a moment she almost left her fingers lying motionless, almost let him have the illusion that she had not heard his accidental request but a tension was returning to his body, the muscles between his shoulder blades beginning to shake. Samantha began to move her fingers again, stroking up and down and in senseless patterns as the tension began to vanish as quickly as it had arrived.

"Why not?"

_Stupid,_ she berated herself silently. _Just be thankful he's not planning to off himself in the bathtub. _

"It's not for lack of desire, believe you me," he told her in an empty tone. "My species… we cheat death."

"Cheat death?" God damn it, she needed to have a long talk with her mouth about consulting with her brain before opening and letting stupid things march out.

"Makes it incredibly hard to kill yourself," he continued, sidestepping the obviousness of the question she had asked him. "I don't think it has ever been successfully done. Suicide by proxy, yes. But simply killing yourself?" He laughed bitterly against her leg, beneath her touch. "Bloody out of luck on that."

Her hand paused at the base of his neck, lingering there as her thumb pressed down and traced circles upon a stubborn knot of tension. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"It is," he growled.

"But everyone has something to offer," she protested, a familiar breathless sensation pooling in her chest. "Everyone is unique. There is no one else like you in existence. Why would you choose to snuff out that potential? Why would you choose to leave those that care for you?" Her voice broke and she shook her head, struggling to take a deep breath, to breathe past the feeling in her chest.

_Breathe, Sam. You have to breathe. You're twenty-six. You're in your apartment in Salt Lake City, Utah. You're sitting in your bathroom with a strange man, an alien man at that, lying in your lap. You're just about as far away from Sarah as you can get. Breathe. Just concentrate on the breathing._

"Whatever I might have once had, whatever I could have been – that's all gone now. Gone and I can never get it back."

Samantha shut her eyes and silently inhaled and exhaled to the count of four. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked hesitantly. All the help websites, all the hotlines, they all said to ask – to get the person to talk, to communicate. She had never been sure that would work though. After all, she had talked to her sister every single day she could remember. Talked and communicated, laughed and cried. They'd done it all and it hadn't stopped _her._

"No," he snapped, fingers tightening around her knee.

"Alright, it's alright," she backtracked, returning her fingers to his hair. "It's alright," she repeated, more for herself than for him. _Breathe_, she reminded herself once more as she stroked those impossibly strands of hair. If it was this soft when it was dirty… well, either way it was wickedly unfair. Her hair was… not coarse but not soft either. Its wavy strands were too thick to be silky. Sarah's hair had been fine and soft and curly – thick ringlets that coiled like springs around her face.

"I don't have anyone." Samantha started out of her train of thought, fingers growing still as they rested on his skull. She stared down at the head resting in her lap. Battered and blood smeared he was studying the tired door of her vanity like it was the most fascinating thing in the universe.

"No one?" she asked, disbelieving. He shook his head against her leg as she began to move her fingers again, not wanting to make him ask a second time. "Mother, father, siblings, friends, distant relatives?"

"No one," he affirmed. "I'm the only one of my species left. Well, there is one other but he and I are… not exactly on good terms." He shut his eyes. _He wouldn't shoot me,_ his earlier words echoed around her head._ Of course he wouldn't. Not even to save the world. _

"Oh," she said softly, completely unsure of what to say.

"I'm nothing and I am all alone. No loss to the universe there, just no way to take myself out of it."

It was there again. Absent for most of the conversation that had taken place on her bathroom floor the heart wrenching desperation, the absolute despair was back in his voice. The self loathing that had colored his face now filled his voice and it made something inside of her break.

Her fingers tightened in his hair before she could stop them. "What is your name?" she asked softly.

He was silent for a long moment. So long that she began to think that he wasn't going to answer her. "The Ma…," he paused and inhaled sharply. "Matt. Matt Yana," he finally told her.

"Well, Matt Yana my name is Sam – Samantha Tate," she told him levelly, returning her gaze to the partial reflection of the pair of them in the mirror. "No one is ever _nothing_," she continued softly. "Besides, now you have me."

* * *

The scones were cold.

Of course they were cold given that they had sat on the floor of her bathroom for the better part of two hours. To say that she had been surprised when she had entered the kitchen and glanced casually at the clock would be an extreme understatement. It hadn't felt like that long, not at all. But the clock didn't lie and both the scones and bacon were cold. Good thing she hadn't made the eggs already. Reheated eggs were nasty, absolutely nasty, and she hated throwing out foot.

Her stomach didn't lie either and right now it was informing her in no uncertain terms that it had been nearly fifteen hours since she had last fed it. After pausing to listen for a minute - yes, the shower was still running – she filled a mug with milk and stuck it in the microwave. She needed food and she needed something hot. It wasn't until she lifted the mug from the microwave and set it on the counter that she noticed her hands were shaking. "Low blood sugar," she told herself firmly and while that was certainly true she also knew it wasn't the real reason, or at least all of it. _Emotional distress. Borderline anxiety attack. Just breathe, Sam and drink your damn hot chocolate._

She sighed and turned the oven back on so that she could reheat the scones and bacon. The way things were going she would wait until Matt was safely out of the shower before did anything about the eggs.

Still covered in most of the dirt and grime he had collected before falling on her doorstep along with the painful, more recent addition of a rather macabre mask of his own blood he had roused from the almost catatonic stupor in her lap when she had suggested that he might like a shower. She had fetched him a towel and a washcloth and he had watched, but said nothing, as she had removed her razor from the shower. After the Bathroom Floor Incident she didn't think that he was lying about his inability to kill himself but she wasn't taking any chances.

She had also managed to dig through her closet and find some clothes that just might fit him. Operative word there: might.

Thanks to her mother's scatter brained, if well meant, method of gift buying she had a deep navy pair of flannel pajama bottoms in a men's size large. Never mind that it was the wrong size and last she checked she was definitely not a man, she knew her mother had probably been strolling through the mall one afternoon and spotted a display proclaiming "Pajama Pants" and noticed that there was a pair in a shade of blue she was pretty sure that Samantha liked. It hadn't been the first time she'd gotten men's or wrong sized clothes from her mother as gift and it probably wasn't the last. These were one of last year's Christmas gifts that she had meant to donate but had never gotten around to actually taking out of her closet. They even still had the tags on them. The shirt was a basic unisex tee that she had snatched up at the company picnic for use as a pajama top. It was suitably big enough to be baggy and comfortable on her but she was more than slightly skeptical that it would prove to be large enough for him.

"Smells good."

Samantha let out a small yelp and narrowly avoided spilling hot chocolate all over her second outfit of the day. "Shit. Sorry. Gah, scones!" She turned opened the open to pull out the baking sheets of both scones and bacon. The scones bordering the exterior of the pan were a little more golden than she would have liked but thankfully, still not burnt. Apparently the universe was smiling at her today. "Clearly I am not used to having people in my apartment," she told him, letting the oven bang shut as she sat the metal sheets on the stove top with a clatter. "Sorry about the noise. Now, you said it smelled good. Does that mean you're hungry? I've got orange vanilla scones – they just need the glaze - and some bacon. Eggs too, but I didn't know if you'd want some or how you'd…" Her voice trailed off as she pulled the oven mitts off her hands and turned around to face him. "… take them," she finished weakly.

_There is a man in my house_, her brain squeaked.

_Of course there is a man in your house, stupid. Let's recap, shall we? Man collapses in front of door. You feel bad. You bring man in like he's a damn stray kitten. You undress man, so yes, you are definitely sure that he is male and he sleeps naked on your couch. You just spent two hours with him in your lap, stroking his hair. He used your shower. He's wearing clothes from your closet and now you're going to feed him. So yes. There is a man in your house. Welcome to your Saturday – have a nice stay._

The clothes fit. That was a good thing. Mostly. The shirt was a bit tight across the shoulders and the chest but it fit well enough. The pants were fine. Fitted across the hips and loose everywhere else. Just fine. More than fine. They also happened to be the same exact shade of blue as his eyes.

_Stop it. You're acting like a crazy person. Take a breath and serve the man some breakfast. You're an inferior life form. Just give the man some breakfast because it is almost noon and stop gawking like a teenage girl._

Right. It was easier said than done, though. The casual attire suited him, especially with multiple days of stubble scruffing up his jaw line and the complete disarray of his hair. He had dried it, at least mostly, but had clearly not bothered to brush it even though she'd left a brush on the vanity counter. He was still pale, deathly so with hardly a hint or blush of life in his skin which made the cuts on his face all the more visible. His eyes were still clear, though. Weary, but full of an awareness and an intelligence that had been lacking earlier. And his eyes were really, _really_ blue.

"How are your hands?" she asked, her mind finally latching on to something that wouldn't make her sound like a complete idiot.

"Sore," he replied shortly, head tipped to one side as he regarded her quizzically. There was something in his gaze that she couldn't quite place. It made her feel a bit like a mouse sitting in front of a snake and a rubik's cube all at the same time. She bit back the urge to ask if she had suddenly grown an extra head and turned back to the food. "And yes. I'm hungry." The look he gave the food sitting on the stove though was apprehensive, almost as if he expected it to jump off the pan and bite him.

"Do you have any food allergies?" she asked, following his gaze. That would be just her luck if he happened to be allergic to what she had made. He shook his head slowly. "Oh. Good. Eggs?"

"Uhhh…" he stared at her, a look of panic momentarily crossing his face. "My last…" he paused and licked his lips. "I…" he paused again and stared at the stove, lips pressed in thought. "I… oh, bloody hell," he swore, giving his head that odd little shake again. "Whatever is easiest for you," he sighed and waved his hand in a very slight, dismissive gesture.

She stared at him, head cocked to one side, and raised an eyebrow speculatively. "You sure? Really, it's no problem…" he shook his head again and waved wearily at the stove. "Alright." Overhead the lights flickered: once, twice, and then they went out, plunging the room into faded gray. "Son of a bitch," she muttered viciously.

Of course the power would pick now to go out. Because she had a half-naked man still recovering from hypothermia in her apartment. Because she had a sad, broken, too-handsome-for-his-own-damn-good-even-though-he-still-looks-half-dead man sitting at her kitchen table. Because there was already a foot or more of snow piled up outside with more falling every second. So _of course_ the power would go out now.

Apparently the Universe was going for the whole "kicks and giggles" package today.

* * *

**A/N Part II: ****I'll be closing on a house and moving this upcoming week so while I intend to do my best to write normally and have the next chapter up in a week I'm apologizing in advance in case I drown in packing boxes. **


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: So sorry, dear readers, for the lengthy delay in getting this chapter to you. I just want to state, for the record, that I did not get thrown off course by moving. No, I got thrown off course by all three of my kids getting sick over the course of a week. Which meant I got no writing done at all. It was awful. Hopefully I'm back on schedule now!**

* * *

Dark. It is dark but not really. Kind of shadowy. Dark and light at the same time. Dim. That's the word he is looking for. It is dim. Why is it dim? "Son of a bitch," the female swears darkly. She is staring at the ceiling as well. "Sorry," she adds a half second later as she glances swiftly over at him. Why does she keep apologizing? Does she imagine that her cursing offends him? It doesn't. If anything he finds the very human epithets reassuring, a vivid reminder that this is actually real and not some twisted sort of dream prison thought up by the mighty of Gallifrey. Besides, if she thought that wouldn't she just stop uttering the curses altogether? Right? But she is still uttering them and apologizing. To him. Someone is apologizing to him. That alone, had he not seen the regenerative differences in his features, would have been enough to convince him that this wasn't real.

But it is real.

Earth. He is on Earth.

She's talking again. His eyes snap open and his superior Time Lord physiology allows him to easily pick her figure out of the dimness. She's staring at the artificial light hanging from the ceiling with her gray eyes narrowed and a look of disgust written across her lips as she continues to mutter curses under her breath. He doesn't bother telling her that he can still hear her. If he tells her she'll stop talking.

She can't stop talking. Please don't stop talking, he begs silently, don't ever stop talking.

But she will. He knows it. No one talks forever.

"What?" he asks. "What's wrong?" What in Rassilon's name is he doing? He's asking a question. He's starting a conversation. Why is he doing that? It will just make her talk more. Oh. That. Right. Talking more. Talking more is good.

"The fu…" she pauses and inhales sharply. "The power has gone out and with the storm being what it is, well it's probably not going to get restored any time soon." He tracks her gaze as it moves to the still covered windows. At least, he assumes that they are windows. "So… good news, bad news. Good news: my apartment is old enough and the owner is so exceptionally slow with updating that the range," she taps the cooking apparatus – stove? Oven? Range? – behind her, "is gas, so we will still have warm food and if I turn on the oven it will do a passing decent job of keeping the kitchen warm. Bad news: everything else in the apartment is electric – no heat, no hot water, no lights. We've both just showered so we should survive without hot water and I've got a decent stash of candles, so we're alright there but I'm worried about you staying warm."

She is worried. About him. Staying warm. Worried. Has anyone ever been worried about him before? He's not quite sure. Is that right? That can't be right. Everyone should have others to worry about them. Except he doesn't have 'others', not anymore. They are all gone now. Dead or trapped inside a time lock - as good as dead. Not that they really worried over him even when they were alive. He'd always been the problem, the troublemaker. So he remembered, anyway. He didn't – or couldn't – remember anything from before the moment where he had stared into the whole of Time and Space and lost everything to the four little beats implanted inside of his head.

Worried.

Right.

This is new.

He gives his head a little shake, willing his consciousness to focus on the here and now. On the fact that she is still speaking to him. _To him_. He had asked her a question to keep her talking. It would be a shame to miss it all because he's blathering away like a crazy person inside of his head. Even if he is a crazy person.

"…we should be okay for a little while but the temperature is going to start dropping in here fairly quickly. My landlord hasn't bothered to ever update the windows so we're looking at lovely single paned numbers from the seventies that don't insulate or keep out the wind worth a damn. Sorry." She's apologizing again. He should tell her that he doesn't mind. She won't think that it makes him weak, right? That he likes her very human swearing? But, on the other hand, if she keeps apologizing then the longer she keeps talking. Apologizing buys him at least one more word, one more second in which her voice drowns the never ending noise in his head.

It's an easy choice. He remains silent.

"Now I've got enough clothes that I can put on an unattractive number of layers and stay pretty warm but my mom's weird shopping habits only get us so far with you. So we're going to have to pile all the blankets here in the kitchen and keep the oven turned on so you don't get too cold. Hell, so I don't get too cold. Sorry, I have got to stop doing that," she mutters, pressing her lips together. He should just tell her, forgo those occasional extra seconds. Right. Should. His mouth stays shut. So. He's that type of man. Apparently impossible regenerations don't change everything. Or maybe Rassilon's hold is still too strong, forever reaffirming its ties with every beat against the inside of his skull. How should he know? What is him? What is the Lord President? Is there even a _him_? What kind of philosophical nonsense is this?

He should just stop thinking.

Right.

"Sorry?" She asks him something and he doesn't even catch it. He's torn between kicking himself for not paying closer attention and patting himself on the back for getting her to repeat herself.

She gives him a strange look and sets a plate of food in front of him. "Do you mind?" she repeats gently. "If I huddle in the kitchen with you? I know this has got to be fifty shades of awkward but there is no way I'm turning you out – not with that wind and those temps and your complete lack of even remotely acceptable clothes. If this is too weird you're welcome to stay out here and I'll just grab a book and…"

"No," he cuts her off. What? He just stopped her from talking. What is wrong with him? And that… was that a growl that come out of his throat? Why? Leaving. She was talking about leaving. Him. All alone. By himself. With only his head for company.

No. No. No. No.

"No," he repeats, moderating his voice into something more normal. Don't scare her, he screams at himself inside of his head. If you scare her she'll go away. She'll leave you alone. _She will stop talking_. The fact that she was an ape was irrelevant. If dancing the tango with a Slitheen made the drumming fade he then, by all that is holy in the universe, he would be the best damned ballroom dancer time and space had ever seen. "Sorry…" What is this? She has him apologizing now? Him? The Master? Apologizing to an ape?

Anything. Anything to make them stop.

She's watching him carefully, an eyebrow elegantly arched over ice gray eyes, like she's not sure if he is about to topple out of his seat – again – or attack her. Neither, he whispers to himself as he clears his throat and tries again. "What I meant was… I don't mind. Stay if you like." Don't go. Don't go. Please, please don't go. "I'm not…I'm not used to this," he gestured between them. "Having someone care. Having someone take me into consideration." Weak. He is so weak. She'll kick him out. Who would want such weakness under their roof? Rassilon, he's not even worthy of licking the dust off her shoes and she's just a human.

Just a human.

Hah.

Just a human has managed to soothe all the madness of Gallifrey.

Don't go. Don't make me go, he chants as he gives in to temptation and begins to eat the food she set in front of him. Maybe if he looks busy enough… Please don't leave me alone, something inside of him cries. Lost and broken.

A warm weight, practically scorching compared to his own chilled skin, settles on his arm. He freezes and looks down. His brain takes several long moments to comprehend that she is touching him, her fingers curled gently over the muscle and bone of his forearm. He stares. "Get used to it," she tells him, her voice thick. Is she alright? Has something… Oh. Tears. He can smell them – a surge of salt and moisture to her scent. Why is she…? Is she hurt? Did she burn… Oh. Him.

She's crying over him.

Also new.

* * *

Jumpy. Sweaty. Chilled. Hearts hammering away in his chest until he feels like he is going to pass out. He's… what is this? Nervous. He's nervous. Why is he nervous? Oh. Right. He stares down at the book clutched in his hands and glances swiftly, from underneath the fringe of his lashes – they're longer in this regeneration, to the cozy enclosure of the kitchen where the female is humming to herself as she slides a large covered pot into the oven. He glances down again and strokes his thumb over the surface of the book.

It's tattered. No, not tattered. Tattered implies neglect and misuse. This is… loved. Worn around the edges, the corners of the pages gone soft and fuzzy from being thumbed through so many times; the spine creased evenly, the binding flexible and soft from being held open in her hands more times than she can likely count. Would she? Dare he hope? It would be… bliss. A miracle he doesn't deserve. A blessing that he is completely unworthy of.

He will ask anyway. He has to. He needs it.

"Matt?" Her voice, soft and raised all the same time brings him snapping back to the here and now. Matt? Oh. Right. That's him. Matt. What possessed him to use the name _Matt_? Never mind that, what was he…? His fingers tighten around the book. Oh. Right.

"I…" he clears his throat roughly, feeling it rumble all the way through his chest cavity. "I was… you don't have… it's… Never mind. No," he takes a deep breath and lets it out shakily. "Would you read to me?" he asks, tentatively holding the book out towards her. He doesn't look at her though. He can't. He focuses his eyes somewhere off to the side, tracing the meandering patterns in the loops of multicolored carpet.

She's staring at him. He can feel it. Can feel the trace of her gaze, the intensity of it as she studies him and the outstretched book. His hand is not shaking. _It's not_. Of course it's not. Why would it be shaking?

Nervous. That's right. The man who has conquered Earth multiple times is _nervous_ over getting a female to read to him.

"Sure," her answer, though only a single word, is long and drawn out. She doesn't understand. She doesn't know why he would want this. She's confused. It doesn't matter. He'll take it. She agreed. She'll read to him. Out loud. With _that_ voice. _Her _voice. He feels like weeping. Or dropping to his knees. Or… why? What is happening to him? Does it even matter?

No. Probably not.

"Thanks," he murmurs, proud that he doesn't do anything stupid. His entire body stills as she takes the book from him, her fingertips brushing against his flesh.

"One of my favorites," she remarks with a smile, stroking the worn cover. "As if you couldn't tell by the state that it's in. God, I need to get another copy." She shakes her head slightly, lost in a bout of inner amusement that he finds enchanting. What would it be like to enjoy getting lost inside one's head? He'll never know. He's never considered that a bad thing or a sad thing until now. Until that little ghost of a smile spread across her face and her slim fingers stroked the soft cover of the book. What must it be like to have the inside of your head be a good place? A safe place?

A safe place? Hah. He has never had that. Is that right? That shouldn't be right… right? Why is he still thinking? He needs to stop that. He has to stop that. Or else he'll lose the precious little control that he has. He'll lose himself, whatever that might be.

"We can sit on the couch for now. The temperature is still decent." She brushes past him to sit on the couch. She pulls one of the blankets into her lap, clearing a space beside her. She expects him to sit there with her. Of course. It will be warmer there, beside her, with the blankets. She doesn't want him to get too cold. She's worried about him.

Sweet Gallifrey, he doesn't know if he can take this.

He sits down awkwardly beside her suddenly unsure of what he is supposed to do. He hadn't thought things through this far, mainly because he hadn't expected her to say _yes_. He had been busy thinking of ways he could cope with the ever increasing volume in his head without scaring her. Without losing all semblance of composure. Without hurting her. Oh, Rassilon, he could hurt her. He'd done it before, hurt his companions while possessed by the darkest depths of his madness.

He wants to put his head in her lap again, he realizes with a small start. Such an intimate, weak gesture but he wants it. It was … comforting. Soothing. Safe. The touch of her fingers in his hair was almost as good as her voice in his ears. Now that he has realized that he wants it he wants it so bad that it hurts. It would be so easy – he could curl himself onto this last two cushions and slide his head into her lap. She could even rest the book on top of his head. He wouldn't mind. Not at all.

He can't tell her that, though. Nope. Not at all. Can't risk scaring her.

He'll just sit here. With a blanket. That will be good. It will. Better even than he deserves.

She's looking at him again with that look, the one that he feels can see straight through him to read every thought, every nuance of his existence as it is written upon the inside of his head. Her head tilts to one side and her eyes narrow speculatively. "Stop that, I don't bite," she finally tells him, her voice dry. "You'd think after the bathroom that you'd be able to… ah, that's it, isn't it? No one to care, no one to worry – you don't know what to do, how to react." She watches him while she speaks, eyes flickering over his face. He's a Time Lord, or was (ish) once upon a time. Superior being. His face shows nothing. Or it should. Clearly though it shows something, something within him responding to her words even he consciously does not. Responses that she can read and process and understand.

She really does have a pretty face, for an ape. Fine boned and delicate but sturdy. No, sturdy seems to imply some form of masculinity. Not sturdy. Or strong. Unbreakable. That's it. She wears it well, her face. Most don't, human or otherwise. She is comfortable in it.

Time. She reminds him of Time. Not in the scary "whole of time and space" sort of way but endless. Delicate. Unbreakable. Full of twists and curves, both complicated and straightforward. He can see the curve of the universe in her jaw, the echo of time in her eyes.

He's waxed poetic again. How pathetic. Comparing a female ape to Time, what sort of shit is that?

"I'll make this easy for you then." She grasps him by the bicep and pulls. Startled by her movement he finds himself unable to respond but simply gapes silently at her as she slides him across the handful of inches separating them until they sit thigh to thigh. She reaches across him to grab the other blanket and wordlessly spreads it across his lap. She stares at him again, head tilted. "Ah," she breathes. "So that's it. Go ahead," she offers him a small smile and motions at her blanket covered lap. "I can see that you want to. I promise to try and not hit you in the head with the book too many times."

Hit him in the head with the…? Oh. _Oh_. Did she…? How did…? _Oh._

He stares at her and this time can't even pretend to keep his emotions from his face. She laughs, softly. It sounds like bells. No. Water. Bells and water. If water chimed as it fell.

"Go ahead," she says again, tugging down on his arm.

He is many things but a complete and utter idiot he is not. Mostly.

He lays his head in her lap and closes his eyes as she opens the book and begins to read. This is… nice. Very nice.

He'd do anything for it to not stop. Anything.

* * *

Dark. It's dark. And cold. Not freezing. But definitely cold.

He blinks his eyes and peers around in the very faint light of a flickering candle. Asleep. He was sleeping. He doesn't remember falling asleep. He remembers… a story. Her voice. She was reading to him. The entire afternoon. Five hours, twenty-seven minutes, and thirty-two seconds exactly. She read to him on the couch with his head nestled in her nap, her fingers straying down from the book every now and then to stroke idly through his hair. When the draft from the windows cooled the room enough they moved to the kitchen, resuming their positions with her back up against the lower cabinets and legs stretched out before her.

She had been apologetic when her voice had grown hoarse, forcing her to stop.

They had eaten. The beef stew that had simmered away in the oven all afternoon had been had and good. He remembered that. He'd been ravenous and eaten four bowls and a fairly significant stack of toast. She had apologized for not making fresh rolls or at least some biscuits. He remembered that, that she had seemed almost disgusted at the fact that she was feeding him simple toast. He hadn't cared. He had been starving; the full force of post regenerative calorie requirements consuming him. And the food had been good. More than good.

She had been amused at his food intake. He remembered that. She had made some joke – at least he thought it was a joke – about males of all species being nothing but a bottomless pit. The Doctor would know better than he if it was actually true or not. Probably was, though.

Afterwards… what had happened afterwards?

Dishes. He had done dishes. He had _volunteered_ to do dishes. Him.

And she… she had made up beds here on the kitchen floor. The female had an impressive number of blankets in her possession. What then…? Reading. She had read some more. And he…

He had fallen asleep. While she was speaking.

He was torn between awe over the fact that he had actually managed to _fall asleep_ and kicking himself for missing a second of her voice.

Speaking of…where is she now?

He shifts. Soft and firm. Warm. Iron and salt and cinnamon. Ah. There. He's laying in her lap again and she's asleep too.

He freezes and peers up through the darkness. He can just faintly make out the curve of her jaw and the line of her nose in the faint flicker of candlelight. The book, where…oh, there. He can see a sliver of paper sticking out of the book about two thirds of the way through. She must have stopped reading sometime after he fell asleep but she hadn't woken him or moved him. He was still where he had been… seven hours, eleven minutes, and forty-nine seconds ago - stretched out on the floor and buried beneath a small mountain of blankets, his face nestled against her thigh.

A fine tremor runs through her flesh, vibrating all the way down to the muscles beneath his cheek. His eyes narrow as he stares up at her face, waiting. Sure enough it happens again. And again.

She's shivering. Cold. She must be cold. All the blankets are on him and most of her is up there, above him.

Unacceptable.

He carefully peels the blankets back from his body and hisses as the cold air rushes into the vacant space and pushes up against his skin. A disgruntled grunt pierces the night. What… oh. The cat… Spartacus? Right. Apparently he had crawled in under the covers. Explains why his stomach is still warm. Rubbing his arms vigorously, lower body temperature and superior Time Lord abilities be damned, he straightens to his full height and looks around. The candle on the table has burned down almost to nonexistence in its glass enclosure. It will go out soon and leave them completely in the dark. He steps around her – Samantha, her name was Samantha. He should use her name – and pads over to the window. The snow has stopped. He can tell that much.

He feels a pang, a twist in both sides of his chest.

The snow has stopped. Power will be restored. The weather will warm and he will be on his way. Drifting. Walking. Alone. Always alone. Just him and the inescapable.

_One. Two. Three. Four,_ he counts silently, tapping the beat out on the cold expanse of the windowsill.

Ah. Well.

He turns and surveys the small cave of the kitchen and the mess of bedding piled on the floor. Buried under the bedding closest to the oven – but not touching, she had been very careful about that – was a foam mattress. She had meant it for him, he knew. Didn't want him lying on the cold hard floor, never mind that he didn't even deserve lying on her floor, let alone getting the softer bed.

Out of the corner of the eye he catches the miniscule movement of her body as it shivers again. Right. He lets the blinds slide slowly shut. His legs are longer. It only takes him one stride to reach her side. Apparently the small excess of height over his previous regeneration is located in his legs. It will take him a while to get used to that. He drops to a crouch beside her, eyes narrowing to study her face.

Over nine hundred years he has lived. Must be close to a thousand now, really. In that time he had been scourge and plague, prankster and stumbling block, mad, insane, good, evil, neutral. Name it, he had likely been in. Kindness, on the other hand, he had neither memory of ever being kind nor any memory of anyone granting kindness to him. Until now, that is. If nothing else today gave him kindness and peace.

Wait. Peace. That is something he has never said, or even though, about his state of mind. Is this what peace feels like? Is this…? _One. Two. Three. Four._ It is still beating away inside of him, thrumming and drumming without end but it is subdued. Quiet. Like an echo. There is space inside of his own head for thoughts and feelings. Space to actually breathe and exist.

She has bought this for him, he knows that. She has bought and built it with her voice and her scent and the very presence of her existence that pervades and soaks the small apartment. How long it will last him he is not sure. Not long, he expects. Maybe the night. Maybe even through the day tomorrow if he is lucky. Beyond that – no, beyond that is too much to hope for, even from this female who is able to work miracles.

Not that it will matter, he supposes, because he will be gone.

Of course he will be gone. Where, he doesn't know. He's a Time Lord without a Tardis; a madman without purpose or identity. But he will be gone. Her life will move on as it must and he must leave, leave before he hurts her. Because he will hurt her. That is what he does. He hurts and he destroys. He has known nothing else.

And he will not do that to her.

Because he is leaving.

Not tonight, though. No, not tonight. The spurt of selflessness only goes so far. He is a selfish man. A selfish, insane man with absolutely nothing left but a death wish that cannot be carried out.

A death wish and the prayer for a voice to never end.

Gently, he gathers Samantha in his arms and scoots on his knees over to the soft bed that she had made up for him, where he would be warmest. He lays her on it and pulls the majority of the blankets over her, tucking them under her chin. Counting silently, his fingers tapping softly against the side of his flannel clad leg, he kneels beside her and watches, waiting for the sporadic shivering to stop. Her… cold? After what she has done for him? Unacceptable.

When he is sure that she is warm and safe, snuggled in the nest he has built around her he gives in to exhaustion that is pulling at the back of his eyes. Why is he so tired? He is a Time Lord of Gallifrey. Superior physiology. Little need for sleep. Then why…? Oh. Right. Regeneration. He keeps forgetting about that. It's easy to forget here with the scent of cinnamon in his nose and the soft trickle and chime of her voice still echoing in his ears. So blessed easy to forget.

He wraps himself in one of the remaining blankets and eases down into the bed she had made for herself, letting his head nestle into the depths of the pillow. He inhales deeply, unable to stop himself. It smells of her. Of every bit. Iron and salt, the flowers of her shampoo, and cinnamon.

Right. Sleep. He needs to sleep.

A small smile curves his lips as he feels the feline climb over his legs to curl up in the fold of blankets between human and Time Lord. Wait. What? Smiling. Is he actually… he lifts a hand to his face, tracing his lips with his fingers.

Smiling. Yes. He's smiling. Involuntarily. Unrehearsed.

This is new.

* * *

Warm. He is warm. Warm and comfortable and safe. What an odd sensation, being safe. Where is he? How is he safe? Oh. That's right… Earth. Regeneration. Human female. A day spent being read to. Good food. Cinnamon and flowers. Peace.

Leaving.

He must leave. Leave before the control she has bought him shatters and he destroys her. Somehow. He is dangerous. Not safe. He must make himself leave. If there is only one time in his life where he is selfless and strong it must be now. He must leave. She bought him peace, yesterday, but the drums are back. They're louder. A little faster. They're closing in on him again. Soon they will consume him, burn him up and reduce him down to less than ash. To nothing.

Just not quite yet. No. Not yet.

Warm and safe and comfortable. He doesn't want to get up. He doesn't want to move. By all of Time and Space, he doesn't want to move. Ever. If there was any mercy in the universe it would just fucking kill him; it would let him die right here and now while he is safe and warm and oh so very comfortable nestled among the blankets and pillows with…

Wait.

What is that? It feels like…

What is…? Is he…? No. He can't be. Right?

His eyelids flutter open and he stares down the length of his torso. Oh. He _is_. He absolutely is. He's holding _her_. He freezes, his respiratory bypass kicking in as he momentarily forgets how to breathe. He shuts his eyes and counts. _One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four._ Slowly, deliberately, he opens his eyes.

Nope.

She's still there.

Real.

Oh, Rassilon.

No, something else, his mind corrects automatically. Don't ever associate the two. Don't ever mention them in the same thought, in the same sentence. Never. Don't sully her like that.

Well. Then. Shit.

Good. No. Bad. This is bad. She's too close. He's too dangerous. This is… this is… like swimming naked in a pool full of piranhas. Or a planet full of Daleks. Or… or… Vashta Nerada. Weeping Angels. The whole universe is full of monsters. And she is with him. The perfection of madness. The epitome of insanity. The nothing. The Time Lord That Never Was.

With him. Snuggled into his chest. Pressed against his side. With his arm wrapped around her.

She stirs beneath his arm and he freezes, once again losing the ability to breathe as she gently drags her nose along the line of one of his ribs.

"You smell good," she breathes, her the trickle and chime of her voice – oh, by all that is holy, her _voice_ – whispering up torso until it reaches his ears. She drags her nose back and forth, inhaling deeply. He reflexively tightens his grip on her. He can't help it. He couldn't stop even if he wanted to. "Like ice and cold and thunder. Winter night and a summer storm."

Oh.

This is… this is definitely new.

Shit does not even _begin_ to cover it.


	6. Chapter 6

**Dear Readers: Apparently the powers that be dislike it when I use terms like "back on track". So let us just leave it at this: I shall do my best to update weekly. If I am late then it is probably safe to assume that non-writing life has gotten in the way of writing. Again. I offer perpetual apologies in advance for those moments.**

* * *

"You smell good, like ice and cold and thunder. Winter night and a summer storm."

Samantha froze as soon as the words left her lips. _Still be asleep. Still be asleep_, she begged silently, pleading to any deity or higher power that might be listening. Her life being what it was though of course he moved in response to her words, dashing all hopes that his body might still be in an unconscious state. Body and limbs seemingly at odds with each other, his torso went utterly still beneath her cheek and his arm tightened around her. "Oh shit," she breathed softly, her lips hardly moving against the soft fabric of the stretched tee. If her words hadn't shocked her into complete and total awareness the sudden knowledge that she was lying pressed up against him, nose burrowed into his chest like she was a damned bloodhound, certainly would have.

_Jesus Christ on a cracker_, she thought silently to herself, repressing the urge to wince as that and an additional string of profanity crossed her mind. If her mother heard her use such phrases she'd be sure to get her mouth washed out with soap – never mind that she was twenty-six years old. _Of course, if mom was here she would be doing a great deal more than washing out your mouth_, her subconscious added as her fingers curled over the curve of his chest, gripping the thin fabric between them. _She'd probably go into cardiac arrest. Or stroke out. Or haul you up by your ear and ground you for a fucking month. _

This was awkward. Really awkward. What must he think of her?

He did smell good though. Really good – the smells of cold and thunderstorms were the strongest but if she paid attention all the best smells of every season were present there. God, they should find a way to bottle this.

_Stop that_, she told herself firmly as she forced herself to let go of the shirt and remove her nose from where it was pressed in very slight hollow between his ribs. She was torn between bolting upright and scrambling away or politely apologizing and getting up gracefully to go about her business. In the end, perhaps spurred on by the reoccurring realization that his grip around her shoulders had not loosened and was effectively trapping her where she lay, she did both – or at least tried to.

"Sorry. So sorry about this. I'm sorry," she blurted, raising her head. At least she tried to raise her head. The grip of his arm immobilized her enough that she could barely get her chin off his chest, which meant that her vocal cords vibrated not unpleasantly against his torso. It was distracting. _Get a grip, Sam. Be cool. Play this cool. You're an adult. You can do this. _"I just… I… I must have gotten cold in the night. Not surprising. Even with the power on I get cold. I seem to lose all ability to retain body heat once I fall asleep. It's awful. Doesn't really make this excusable or acceptable… but." She grimaced. She was rambling; rambling like a lunatic. Of course if she had been insane this either wouldn't have been happening or she would at least have the protection of an insanity plea. An insanity plea would be nice, especially considering she was currently fighting an almost overpowering urge to rub her nose along his chest again.

Nope. That wasn't happening. Of course not.

"Shit," she muttered again and then frowned. "Sorry. Sorry. Just…" she waved her hand vaguely. "Sorry," she finished lamely. She _was_ sorry – very much so - especially since he seemed to have been traumatized to the point of not being able to breathe. There were only so many times she could apologize though. Even for this. Samantha finally dredged up the courage to look up his face.

He was frozen, staring down at her with a mixture of fear and wonder written with a heart breaking clarity on his face. It was clear, to her at least, that this was a position he had never found himself in before and he didn't know how to react. He didn't know what he was supposed to do or feel. In a flash of insight – like yesterday when he wanted to lie with his head in her lap but clearly thought was an _off limits _sort of request -she could see on his face that he didn't even know what to think. He had no frame of reference to guide him in this matter and as such his mind was running in fifty thousand directions all at once.

"Thanks though," she added softly. "I remember being cold and then… not. It was nice. Not being cold." Some of the tension eased from around his lips but he made no other movement. "I seem to have leeched off all of your heat though," she could feel her mouth turn down in a grimace of guilt. "Sorry about that. It was nice to be warm but… it could be dangerous for you if you get too chilled. Stupid. I should have slept on the couch…"

"No," his voice cut through hers, thick and rough with disuse. It rumbled, surprisingly deep through his chest cavity and buzzed pleasantly against her skin. He cleared his throat. "No," he repeated, his voice a little clearer, a little more gentle. "It's… I don't… It's…," he sighed, inhaling sharply seemingly just to blow it out in frustration. "My people – we have a lower body temperature than ape… than humans. I'm just… I'm glad to have been of some use." He nodded a little to himself, his eyes looking to some distance she could not see. "You must get very cold."

"I do," she agreed, shrugging slightly. "Normally I just snuggle up with Spartacus until he gets disgusted with me and huffs off to the couch. Speaking of, where is he?" Samantha lifted her head – it had drifted dangerously close to snuggling back into place on his chest – and looked around. She _was_ looking for her cat but mostly she was yelling at herself internally. _God damn it Sam, it's not that hard! How are you still lying here? This is awkward. Beyond awkward and probably more than a little embarrassing. Don't. Don't you dare lean down and stick your nose up against him. Don't care how good he smells. Nope. Just pull it together, Sam. Just get up. Just grow a damned pair and get up!_

"I… uh. He was snuggled in between us for… a while. He must have…"

"Moved?" she finished when he trailed off, his eyes going distant again as he looked down the expanse of his upper torso to where she rested."He's not the sharpest pencil in the box but he does have his moments of brilliance – especially when it comes to self preservation. He doesn't like being a pillow." She sighed. _Get up, Sam!_ "Sorry about that. Again." She dropped her gaze to his chest. _Bad move! Bad move! Get up! Get your lazy ass up! No. Don't smell him. Stop touching him. You don't know him. You don't know anything about him! Get up!_

_ Except that he's not human and he's broken. Broken in the worst way with no one to take care of him_, that little voice inside of her whispered. It was the same voice that had led her to lying to Mary; the same voice that had convinced her to not call the police or even an ambulance. _He's lost and confused. Hurt. Alone. _

_ That doesn't mean I have to cuddle with him even if he does smell fabulous – God, why can't that come in a bottle? – And look a bit… handsome. _

_ Handsome, huh? That's what you're going with?_

_ Just shut up. Shut up and get up. God, forget not knowing anything about him now this is just embarrassing. With a capital "E". _

"Sorry, what was that?" He had been talking, probably answering her question about breakfast while she had been off arguing with herself. "Still waking up," she lied, because of course it was a lie. She'd never been more awake in her entire life. "My brain just zoned out on me."

A small touch of a smile tugged at his lips, restoring life to his still pale face. "Humans," he said it like it was a bad thing and yet not. It was a tone of a voice that should have been accompanied by an eye roll and a big smirk. "Never could understand why you sleep so much. Thirty, forty, fifty percent of your life just _gone_…" he swallowed suddenly, the ghost of a smile slipping from his face as the shadow of something horrible, some terrible thought or memory moved behind his gaze. _I don't have anyone_, he had told her. Given the little information he had given her she had assumed that this was a direct reference to the fact that he was, apparently, one of two surviving members of his society. But what if it wasn't? What if it there was something – someone – else that he had lost?

_Because the loss of his entire people wouldn't be enough. Sure. Just go with that. Idiot. Stop over thinking things – you _always_ over think things._

"Chocolate and sleep – if it's good it's worth it no matter what," she meant it to be playful, something silly to wipe the faraway look of doom and gloom off his face. It didn't quite come out that way. It started out that way, of course, but by the end it was kind of soft and wistful. Kind of like most good intentions: you start the day with grand plans and breakfast in heaven and by nightfall you're sharing drinks with the devil and waiting on a menu in hell.

"I used to think that – or something like that. That the end was worth the means," he remarked distantly. "I did many things because of it. Many, many things." His grip around her shoulders tightened again, rendering her unable to take a deep breath.

"Not anymore?" she asked, unable to keep herself from nose-diving into the darker turn the conversation had taken.

"No more," he whispered, giving his head that peculiar little shake. It was as if he was trying to dislodge something: a thought, a memory... something. "The whole process lost its allure when seen in a different light." He shut his eyes and his entire body flinched beneath her, rippling from head to toe as his flesh sought to pull away from an invisible blow. "I have to go." Spoken so softly, with just the barest twitch of his lips, her ears almost missed the words as they feebly moved the air in front of his mouth.

His entire demeanor changed: the soft, surprised, semi-relaxed ease of just moments before disappearing in the blink of an eye. Before her eyes she watched him melt, shift, and fold into an entirely different man. The lines of his jaw became tighter as he ground his teeth together, the fullness of his lips disappearing into hard thin lines. Even his body beneath her suddenly felt harder, sharper.

"You can't," the words fell out of her mouth before she could stop them. If she could have, she would have. She had no right to tell him what to do. He was only here because he had possessed the good fortune to collapse across her doorstep. Pure chance: that was it. He could just have easily fallen over her neighbor's welcome mat and lain there for god knows how long. Probably until he was long dead, though if his species really possessed the ability to 'cheat death' perhaps he would have survived the biting wind and driven snow. Perhaps not. He hadn't looked very alive when she had pulled him into her apartment. Still, pure chance did not give her any authority over his actions. None whatsoever. Still, the words came out. "It's too cold. You don't have dry clothes," she scrambled after a lengthy pause in which he just looked at her, those dark blue eyes narrowed and cutting in thought.

"I have to go," he repeated, his voice at odds with the harsh transformation that had taken over his body. His tone itself was wistful and full of both urgency and regret. He was not just telling her, she realized after a moment, in fact that may have been the least of what he was doing. He was telling himself, convincing himself that it was what he needed to do. She opened her mouth and suddenly his hand was there, the soft press of long fingers silencing the words before she ever spoke them. "You are…" he shook his head again, a moment of softness and disbelief peaking through the armor he had put on himself. "I have to go. I must. I am… I am a terrible man, Samantha," he murmured. A tiny jolt of electricity ran through her at the sound of her name coming out of his mouth. It was the first time he had said it. "I'm selfish and twisted and diseased. No," he pressed his fingers against her lips a little tighter, stalling the reply he must have seen forming in her face. She had always had an expressive face. Mary gave her crap for it all the time. "You don't know me, so trust me on this. You do not want me here. I don't deserve to be here. I must go, before it is too late."

There would be no convincing him otherwise. She saw that almost instantly – an iron resolve that joined that tightness already present in his face. He was leaving. This broken, sad man was leaving. Not right now, this very instant, but he would before the day was gone. He would put on his clothes and walk out her door into the snow.

And she would never see him again.

He removed his fingers from her lips, curling them down into the palm of his hand.

"At least stay long enough for some breakfast," she told him, trying to sound normal even though she was having trouble talking around the sudden lump of concern that was stuck in her throat, "and for me to run your clothes through a dry cycle. They should have the power on before too long. The email from the power company said it would likely be back on by noon today." That was the least she could do for him, she supposed. If he insisted, for whatever the reasons were that were driving him, on going back out into the cold and disappearing to god-only-knows-where she would at least see that he did it with dry clothing on his back and warm food in his stomach.

"Right. Breakfast," he let his breath out shakily, as if suddenly remembering that he had to exhale. The unsteadiness that she could hear in his breath continued downward in another body rippling shudder as he wrenched his arm away from her. There was no other way to describe it. He ripped it from around her shoulders like she had burned him, or like it was a band aid. "I can do breakfast."

_Get up. Now. Stand up. Just. Do. It. _Her inner voice barked.

She got to her knees, pausing there because the sudden shift in her body orientation made her head swim. _Not enough water yesterday_, she observed quietly to herself. _Probably should fix that. _His hand was there, hovering over the curve of her elbow like he wanted to grab her and steady her but he had stopped himself, stopped himself just short of doing so. "I'm fine," she reassured as she took several deep breaths and clambered to her feet with significantly less grace than she might have wished. "Just need some water."

She located her cup from yesterday and finished off the contents, mindful of his watchful stare from the floor. Yesterday he had passed through the day almost in a daze, unfocused and unsure. Now he was the exact opposite. He was a different man entirely, except not. Different and the same all at the same time, like two different men had been overlaid on each other, the lines blurred between them until it was impossible to figure out where one left off and where the other began.

"So, breakfast," she turned and looked over her shoulder at him. He was still on the floor, though crouching now instead of lying, his fingers drumming silently against the curve of his thigh. "What do you want?" she asked, bringing the conversation of the morning full circle. Hopefully this time it led to food instead of to… whatever it was that had happened.

His fingers stilled against his legs, curling themselves into fists as he gazed up at her with those impossibly dark blue eyes fringed with the equally impossible gold lashes. When he finally spoke it was sure and fierce and hard like the man who knelt practically at her feet. In his tone and his words though she could also hear the man of yesterday: the man who had broken and sobbed into her lap like the entire universe had ended, the broken, lost man who had lacked the reference or words to comprehend, much less ask for, an act of compassion.

"Whatever you can give me."

* * *

For once in her life the power company and the news reporters were correct: the power was on by noon. Earlier, in fact. Normally she would have found the occurrence miraculous and may have even sent Mary a "_WTF? Can you believe that it is actually on when they said it'd be on?!_' text but not today. Today she actually felt a pain in her chest as the lights in the kitchen blazed into existence as they sat eating bowls of oatmeal and fruit and sharing a platter of sausage links. She had hoped that today might be one of those days were bureaucratic promises were made in haste to calm the masses. A small, tiny part of her had hoped that the day would come and go with no progress made; that another day and night would be pass with her small apartment plunged in cold and darkness.

So of course the power came back on. She should have expected it, really, because that's the way the universe worked.

"Should I run your clothes through the wash, too?" she asked quietly, her voice breaking through the strange sight of both of them staring at the ceiling lights. "They were pretty dirty," she added, hoping that it didn't sound as pushy as it did in her head.

He shook his head and turned his gaze back to the oatmeal in his bowl, prodding a blueberry around with his spoon while avoiding her gaze. "No," despite the slump of his shoulders his voice was firm and decided. She sighed. Still no change then – it had probably been too much to hope for in the first place. "Just drying them is fine."

_It's not something you should have been hoping for at all! _Her pepper spray toting self retorted. _Honestly, it's a miracle you haven't been murdered yet. Just let him go and stop moping!_

She stared at him for a long moment as he resolutely stopped chasing the blueberry and began spooning the rest of the oatmeal into his mouth. "Alright then," she pushed back from the table and stood, letting her spoon fall into the bowl with a small _clink_. Despite the fact that she'd only eaten half of her oatmeal she suddenly wasn't hungry anymore. "Just the dryer then."

_Dear god, Sam. Snap out of it. What the hell is wrong with you?_

* * *

"Here, take this." Samantha held a slightly worn black backpack out towards him, shaking it slightly to get his attention as he froze in the middle of shrugging the sweatshirt on over both his tee and hers, which she had insisted that he keep. After another little shake his gaze dropped from her face to what she held in her hand.

"What… what is it?" he asked hesitantly as he tugged the black fabric of the hoody down over his hips. She gave him a pointed look and he reached out one hand and took it from her. His arm dropped a fraction of an inch. The bag was heavier than he had expected it to be. For some reason that made her smile.

"Not much, but a little. Some bottles of water, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, granola bars, a sandwich, a couple of apples…" she trailed off and sighed, looking away. "Not enough," she repeated, "But at least it's something."

Out of the corner of her eye she caught the look of surprise that bloomed across his face. For just a moment the iron mask and the tension that he had worn all morning slipped. It slipped long enough for her to see that startling, heartbreaking look that told her that he didn't know what was happening, that he didn't understand what she was doing. He looked to her, watching her with that look on his face when he thought that she couldn't see him. She could see the moment that the realization caught up with him, the moment that it occurred to him that she was trying to help. His grip on the bag tightened and he pulled it closer, eyes falling from her back to it.

"Thank you." By the way the words came out of his mouth she could tell that they were not words he was used to saying. He didn't know anything about gratitude, just like he knew nothing about compassion. "I…just…" he shut his mouth and shook his head, whatever it was that he wanted to express failing to make it out of his mouth.

"Where are you going to go?" she couldn't help asking, even if it was nosy. She could almost hear her mother prattling in her head: _Samantha Lee, we don't pry into people's lives! Be polite!_

He shrugged and slipped his arms through the straps of the backpack. "Don't know," he replied honestly. "I'm still not entirely sure how I got here. Don't worry though, I'll be fine." He offered her the ghost of a smile. "I'm always fine."

_No, you're not_, she whispered inside of her head, the memories of yesterday's breakdown all too fresh in her mind. But she didn't say it – not out loud at least. "I'll worry anyway," she said instead, offering him a sad little smile of her own. "It's what I do. Besides, everyone should have someone, somewhere worrying about them. It's only human."

"And I am not."

She shrugged. "Doesn't matter." She moved forward, turning to look at him as she passed him on the way to the door. "Just…just promise me something? Just nod your head and let me have this, right? If you happen to find yourself wandering around here again, just stop by. Even if it is just for something to eat. So I know you're not dead in a ditch somewhere."

Samantha didn't recall seeing him move, but he must have, because suddenly he was right there, in front of her, with a look on his face that she could not even begin to describe. Slowly, carefully, as if it pained him, he nodded.

"Good. Well, then. I guess… you're leaving." He nodded again, still watching her with an intensity that bordered on frightening as he tilted his head to the side. The fact that his actions seemed to mirror her own from yesterday while they sat on the couch was not lost on her. Had he felt so exposed when she had looked at his face and read his thoughts beneath the layers of uncertainty that covered them? Though, if he was doing the same she didn't know what type of thoughts he was reading. Right now she wasn't thinking anything. She couldn't think anything. Her brain had simply given up trying to talk to her and was mercifully, disappointingly, blank. "I wish you luck. I hope… I hope things work out for you. Whatever those things might be."

His hand folding around the curve of her face silenced her, his thumb sweeping gently down the line of her nose. The warm, outward rush of his breath against her face gave her a half a second of warning before his lips touched her own. It was barely a kiss – just a gentle press of his lips against hers – but it was a struggle not to sag into him anyway. Distantly, she was aware of her mace-toting persona muttering about getting a gun permit but the rest of her wasn't paying attention. Instead, her entire focus had narrowed in on the brush of cool lips against her own; lips that tasted exactly how he smelled.

_God, they need to find a way to bottle that_, she thought again.

How long the barely-a-kiss lasted she did not know. Seconds? Minutes? A lifetime? All were equally possible. However long it was though, it ended too soon. For just a moment his fingers curled along the line of her jaw and tightened ever so slightly. Then he released her and lifted his head away.

"Thank you," he breathed against her lips. "Samantha."

And then his fingers were over hers, twisting the doorknob and opening the door. He paused, for just a second in the doorway and raised the hood on his sweatshirt, covering the white-gold of his hair. Then, without turning, he grasped the knob on the other side and pulled the door shut.

Gone, as strangely as he had arrived.


End file.
